A cardiologist built a complex app to generate patient consultation summaries in just seven days[1]. A group of high schoolers devised a program to turn texts into printable, tactile Braille models[2]. A 13-year old built a full 3D game in one week on his own[3] – something that would have taken a full team of software developers and a substantial budget in the 1990s.Each of these things happened because the cost and complexity of building software has fundamentally changed.  For policymakers, founders and investors in Southeast Asia, that shift has concrete implications for where the next set of opportunities concentrate and who gets to access them.Vibe coding is a form of AI-assisted development where programmers describe what they want in natural language and AI systems generate the underlying code. The term was coined by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in February 2025 to describe a workflow where the developer defines intent and iterates through conversation, rather than writing code line by line. The concept resonated because it named a behaviour that was already emerging as large language models became capable of producing entire features, files, and applications from simple language prompts.For experienced engineers, vibe coding also changes productivity dynamics. Developers spend less time on boilerplate and debugging. More time can be spent on system design and product thinking.The same dynamic compresses competitive barriers. When any founder can build a working prototype in a weekend, the ability to build is no longer a differentiator.The Difference Between Traditional and Vibe CodingIn enterprise settings, AI assisted coding environments are already responsible for a substantial share of new code written, signalling a structural shift in how software is produced. For individuals with limited resources, vibe coding can turn an idea into a working product within days.The difference between traditional and vibe coding is not a matter of workflow preference. It is a difference in risk profile. Traditional development prioritises correctness, long-term stability and maintainability. Vibe coding prioritises speed, with higher risk and less predictable outputs. 

AspectNormal CodingVibe CodingPrimary goalCorrectness, maintainability, and long‑term robustnessMomentum, creativity, and getting something working nowPlanning styleDetailed upfront planning (design docs, specs, tickets)Minimal planning; ideas evolve while codingCode structureClean, consistent, and intentionally organizedCan be messy or uneven, refined later if neededSpeedSlower upfront, faster over the long runVery fast upfront, can slow dramatically laterWho it suits bestTeams, large codebases, long‑lived systemsSolo developers, hackathons, early exploration

 Popular tools associated with vibe coding include:•    Cursor – An AI native code editor that integrates deep context awareness and conversational coding directly into the integrated development environment (IDE). •    Devin  – An autonomous AI “software engineer” capable of completing multistep development tasks end to end. •    Lovable – A vibe coding platform aimed at non technical users, enabling full app creation through text prompts alone.•    Replit – A collaborative, browser based development environment that integrates AI driven code generation and deployment. Together, these tools illustrate how vibe coding spans both professional engineering workflows and mass market software creation. Venture capital has moved quickly into the space. Cursor, the AI-native code editor built by Anysphere, closed a $2.3 billion funding round in November 2025 at a $29.3 billion valuation and was reportedly in discussions for a further raise at $50 billion by April 2026. Lovable, the European market leader for non-developer vibe coding, closed at a $6.6 billion valuation by the end of 2025. Cognition Labs, creator of autonomous coding agent Devin, reached a $10 billion valuation following successive rounds from 2024.Just like in now-ubiquitous large language models as well as agentic AI, the intense competition among top tier investors for stakes in vibe coding leaders suggests a strong belief that AI native software creation is already redefining how digital products are built. What This Means for Southeast AsiaAs vibe coding has illustrated, lower development costs will bring new business propositions and different kinds of expectations for founders seeking early-stage capital.When building is no longer the primary constraint, investors ask questions that are more specific: whether the team can reach markets with fragmented infrastructure, whether they hold sector-level data that a global entrant would not have access to, and whether the product is embedded in local workflows in a way that is genuinely difficult to displace.Malaysia's venture activity in 2025 reflected this kind of selectivity. Total equity funding reached $257 million from 40 deals, up from $141 million across 58 deals in 2024[4]. Fewer deals, larger cheques and higher conviction per investment. Capital is concentrated in companies with structural advantages, not just those that could move fast.  Lower development costs make it cheaper to enter a market, but they do not address the harder question of building a position that is difficult to displace.VC is the Key to Unlocking Frontier TechnologiesThe scale and speed of investment into vibe coding tools highlights a broader truth about VC. It continues to play a central role in backing transformative technologies before their full economic impact is visible.Vibe coding sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence, developer infrastructure, and labour transformation. It is exactly the kind of platform shift that VC has historically sought to underwrite, and that early-stage fund managers in Southeast Asia are now positioned to back in sectors where global capital has yet to focus. By providing risk capital alongside networks, governance support and sector knowledge, venture firms including those backed by Jelawang Capital help founders translate building speed into durable competitive positions in markets that global platforms have not yet prioritised. Vibe coding represents the next step toward a world where software is limited less by who write code and more by who understands the problem deeply enough to build the right solution. In Malaysia, it presents a valuable opportunity for founders. And identifying  trends early is what venture capital is for. Sources: “Doctor builds an AI app for medical documentation without writing code and finishes top three at Anthropic’s hackathon”, Times of India“These fifth graders vibe coded a real-world Braille tool”, GeekwireVibe Coding for KidsDealStreetAsia, 2025 SEA Startup Funding Report 

 Founder and CEO, Nuraizah Shamsul Baharin, did not set out to build a fintech.  She set out to test a simple premise: A single donation, structured to recycle rather than disappear, could do what charity cannot. What followed was a VC-backed platform operating across three countries, multi-international awards, and a proprietary credit scoring system that Malaysian financial institutions are now seeking to access. She explains how a small pilot during Malaysia’s first pandemic lockdown became the foundation for a financial inclusion model that is drawing attention from investors and policymakers across the region. Three Women, RM3,000, One ConditionIn 2020, Malaysia’s first national lockdown had shuttered businesses overnight. Three women micro-entrepreneurs, one selling mixed rice, another making cookies and one selling Malay traditional treats, had watched their cash flow disappear in a matter of days. They had no credit history and no collateral. Nuraizah Shamsul Baharin, then running her second technology company, had this idea for a fintech that facilitates paying it forward.  She reached out to friends and raised RM3,000, then gave these three ladies zero-interest microfunding with one condition: when they recovered, they would pay it back so the money could go to the next woman in line.One month later, the three women had collectively generated RM18,000 in revenue.They are not outliers. Some 15% of Malaysia’s adult population of 23 million are unbanked[1], meaning they have little to no access to the formal financial system. Another 40% were considered underbanked, holding basic accounts but receiving none of the services that actually build economic security: credit, insurance, or long-term savings. Many are housewives running home-based or micro businesses, invisible to the formal financial Institutions, not because they lack discipline or potential to run a business, but because they never had the opportunity to generate a credit history. For these women, sometimes a small amount of funding is not just a convenience.  It is the difference between having a business and having none.MADCash steps in with capital and training to help realise their aspirations.The beneficiaries of the loans have started a wide array of self-sustaining ventures, including food products, F&B industry, agriculture, mobile wellness and beauty services  as well as heritage and batik crafts. Some have built their businesses online through social media and e-commerce, while others have formalised their financial management for the first time. Behind each of these ventures is a woman who, without access to structured capital and training, would have had no formal pathway to build one.“We see entrepreneurship as a way to level the playing field in achieving gender equality, and when women increase their take-home pay, this will in turn, build higher economic growth for their families and their community,” Nuraizah says. MADCash provides zero-interest micro funds to women entrepreneurs alongside a structured entrepreneurship program while building a Future Bankability Index which predicts how long it would take a woman with limited or impaired credit history to become bankable.  The loans are not made out of charity.  They are a stepping stone to long-term financial empowerment and, eventually, to a place in the formal financial system.Source: MADCash Impact ReportTo date, the fintech has supported over 1,500 women entrepreneurs, with approximately 1,200 receiving direct funding.  MADCash has disbursed close to RM3 million in micro funds, with an additional RM1.5 million facilitated through a partner bank. Over a one-year tracking period up to September 2025, its participating women entrepreneurs generated cumulative revenue of RM5.4 million from their business ventures. In its recently released impact report[2], MADCash notes that participation in its entrepreneurship programme grew exponentially as the company expanded support beyond financing to capability building. Last year alone, it supported more than 500 women entrepreneurs.The Engineer Who Saw What Bankers MissedNuraizah holds an engineering degree and spent years building technology companies, including CWorks Mobile, a mobile application development firm, and Madcat World, a software development company focused on community-based platforms. She understands systems, data, and scale.  With MADCash, the mission of helping the unbanked and underbanked addresses a clear funding gap in finance. The current formal financial system, which relied on credit history, collateral, and formal employment, was designed for a different kind of economic actor.   The women she was working with had real business discipline. They repaid on time.  Their revenues grew. They reinvested. “By enabling women to increase their take-home income, MADCash supports broader household stability and community-level economic growth. When you invest in a woman, she will give 90% back to her family and her community, and we have seen that with the ladies we work with and this is also true worldwide,” Nuraizah explains.  Source: MADCash Impact Report The Model: Why Zero Percent is Not Charity Like any startup, MADCash operates as a for-profit organisation in the fintech industry. The company is often misperceived as a social enterprise, even though its business model is designed to be commercially sustainable while delivering measurable impact. The instinctive reaction from the finance world, when MADCash pitches zero-interest microfunding, is scepticism. Zero interest sounds like a subsidy.  It sounds unsustainable.  Nuraizah has heard it many times.  Her answer is structural, not ideological.The zero-interest model is grounded in Qard Hasan, a benevolent loan concept from Islamic finance that emphasises trust and repayment without interest.  The commercial elegance is in the recycling mechanism. A single donation does not fund one entrepreneur.  It funds many, sequentially.  A woman receives between RM1,000 and RM5,000 in micro financing, repaid over ten months through monthly instalments.  As she repays, the capital is redeployed to the next entrepreneur in the queue.  One donation becomes a perpetual fund.MADCash has also been introducing elements of Murabahah (cost plus financing) that emphasise shared responsibility and value creation, to ensure flexibility in sustaining operations commercially over the long term.“MADCash works with the simple premise that charity only solves a problem at one point in time. Our focus is on helping entrepreneurs build sustainable businesses so that they are not dependent on charity or aid,” she says. The Infrastructure Play: Scoring the Unscorable MADCash’s platform generates something that Malaysian financial institutions have found difficult to build independently: a credit dataset on borrowers that the formal system has never been able to profile.When a woman entrepreneur without a formal credit history applies for a business loan, a traditional bank faces a binary problem. It cannot assess her risk because the inputs it normally uses, such as payslips or credit reports, do not exist. So, the bank declines. The entrepreneur stays underserved.  The cycle continues.By onboarding entrepreneurs digitally, tracking repayment behaviour, monitoring business revenue growth, and measuring capability development through its academy programmes, MADCash generates a dataset about each entrepreneur.  This dataset is the foundation of its Future Bankability Index, designed to measure the potential creditworthiness of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) not based on what they own today, but on how they behave over time.  For the entrepreneurs, this is a structured pathway to become bankable over time.“As an impact-driven fintech, we utilise technology to onboard, educate, and engage with our beneficiaries, while providing them with access to support and networks,” she says. How VC Supports Impact-Driven Fintech MADCash raised RM5 million in its latest funding round led by Artem Ventures, with added backing by MSW Ventures. The venture capital funding reflects that MADCash is a scalable business with a trajectory towards long term growth and profitability.“A key challenge was raising sufficient funds under management to be deployed as loans, which required us to redefine how corporate social responsibility (CSR) and Islamic social finance funds could be utilised. Our investors have been our sounding board from the beginning, helping us refine our business model and improve how we manage and grow the company,” says Nuraizah.MADCash expanded internationally to Singapore and Tajikistan, while also strengthening its credibility through Malaysian and Singaporean investors participating in both pre-seed and seed rounds. In September 2024, the platform began providing entrepreneurship training in Singapore. In Tajikistan, the platform has been deployed in partnership with the IMON Foundation, serving a predominantly Muslim-majority market with significant unmet demand for Shariah-compliant microfinance.Multiple international recognitions have strengthened MADCash’s credibility in this expansion push. Last year, the company won the top prize at the 7th EFICA (Ethical Finance Innovation Challenge and Awards) in Dubai and was named the Catapult: Inclusion Southeast Asia winner, an accelerator organised by LHoFT Luxembourg House of Financial Technology and the Asian Development Bank. MADCash was also awarded the Money Awareness and Inclusion Awards for Closing the Gender Gap and Best For Profit for Under-served Communities in 2024. Balancing Profit and Purpose   Small businesses funded by microloans create jobs and services within communities, stimulating local economies and reducing unemployment. Entrepreneurs then reinvest profits to grow their business, boosting economic activity. This cycle leads to lasting improvements for micro entrepreneurs, increased financial inclusivity, and added benefits to the communities, including job creation and economic growth.For venture investors, the opportunity is in recognising that the Future Bankability Index and the data layer it represents is infrastructure. The company that builds the alternative credit scoring standard for Southeast Asia’s unbanked women entrepreneurs is a data business with recurring-revenue potential from financial institutions that need exactly that dataset to expand their addressable market.The VC ecosystem has a role to play in driving this shift, Nuraizah says, suggesting that investors balance a profit motive with social impact. “More VCs should establish funds designated for female-led and impact-driven companies. Intentional capital allocation and ecosystem support can significantly accelerate the growth of female-led companies in Malaysia,” she says. MADCash is currently working on adopting AI tools to improve and simplify their registration and profiling process.  They are also looking at building tools to engage better and encourage rewards in prompt repayment.  Sources:[1] “Limited offerings, fierce competition stall progress in Malaysia's digital banking sector”, The Business Times [2]MADCash Impact Report 2022–2025. 

A decade ago, Cheong Jin Xi had a vision to make drones more accessible to the masses. Today, Aonic operates across 15 countries, holds major contracts with Malaysian plantation groups, and is profitable. But part of the story that doesn’t usually make the headlines is what’s happening in the paddy fields of northern Malaysia.The problem that shaped the companyMalaysia’s agriculture sector has long faced a structural challenge that no policy document fully captures: the people doing the hardest physical work are getting older, and their children are leaving. For smallholder paddy farmers in states like Kedah and Perlis, applying pesticides and fertilisers means carrying a heavy backpack sprayer across uneven terrain, often in the heat, with direct chemical exposure.  It is physically punishing work, and for decades, there was no practical alternative.Cheong saw this not as a social problem but as an engineering one. If you could automate the spraying, you could remove the labour constraint entirely. Aonic’s Mist Drone, built for blanket spraying in open-field crops, is up to 20 times more efficient than manual methods in paddy fields. Its locally engineered and manufactured Oryctes drone, now known as Mist Tec, delivers point-to-point precision spraying at eight times the efficiency of manual labour for crops like oil palm and durian. Both are supported by proprietary software like Airamap Desktop and the Mist Flight App.  Aonic has also made inroads with agricultural companies that operate at a larger scale. In large plantation sites, applications of chemicals were previously done manually with human labour. This made it difficult for companies to gather data on when and how much chemicals were applied.Mist Tec solves this by automating input application and gathers the data for each individual tree and field, providing useful information to growers on maximising efficiency and production.That understanding came from years of direct fieldwork.  “This was during the first five years of our operations,” Cheong recalls.  “Such hands-on experience shaped how we built our solutions. By running fieldwork ourselves, we understood exactly where automation could transform operations.”Cheong sees the shift as structural rather than incremental. “Farmers already understand the value, banks offer financing, cooperatives provide grants, and governments subsidise mechanisation,” he says. “What once felt like pushing uphill has grown into industry-wide momentum.”What scale looks like on the groundAonic’s growth metrics are well documented with triple-digit CAGR since 2022, over USD60 million in annual revenue and profitable since 2023.  In a recent announcement, the company secured USD10 million in funding during a Series A round led by Kairous Capital.  But what the headline figures do not capture is the infrastructure the company has been quietly building underneath them.Aonic is not just selling drones.  It is building the conditions under which drone adoption becomes self-sustaining by setting up a wide network of 3S (sales, service, and spare parts) centres where customers can reach Aonic quickly, offering financing for smallholders who cannot absorb upfront costs, and training so they can fly effectively. The scale of the opportunity was always clear to Cheong, even when the path was not. “As adoption grew, it became clear that the opportunity in Southeast Asia’s agriculture sector was massive,” he says. “Most farms still relied on slow and inconsistent manual labour. With the right backing, we could scale quickly and build a more automated, data-driven agricultural ecosystem.”The ecosystem effectOne of the less visible outcomes of Aonic’s model is the micro-economy it has seeded in agricultural communities. Because purchasing a drone outright remains expensive for most smallholders, a class of local service providers has emerged where individuals use Aonic’s Mist Drones to offer spraying services to neighbouring farms. They are, in effect, small business owners created by the existence of the technology.At the other end of the scale, Aonic holds contracts with major plantation operators in the country.  Malaysian-made drone technology is now integral to the operations of one of the country’s largest agribusinesses. What emerges is a complete cycle from national capital that is channelled through institutional fund managers to spur homegrown innovations. Today, drone technology benefits all layers of the agricultural ecosystem, from the largest plantation groups down to a smallholder farmer in Kedah who no longer has to carry a backpack sprayer in the midday sun.Why the next generation is coming backPerhaps the most telling signal of Aonic’s impact is one that does not appear in any financial statement.  Across communities where drone adoption has taken hold, younger Malaysians who had left farming behind are returning. Not because farming has become easier out of necessity, but because it has become viable as a livelihood.  For some, it has become a business.For policymakers thinking about rural economic resilience and the long-term sustainability of Malaysia’s food production base, this is the outcome that matters.  It is a distinction Cheong returns to when describing Aonic’s early years.  “Being an early mover meant our biggest challenge was not selling agricultural drones, it was building the market.”  He added that farmers were not sure drones would work for their crops and questioned their commitment especially since banks wouldn’t finance the technology.  What this means for the ecosystemAonic’s trajectory reflects a broader thesis about how capital should work in Malaysia’s innovation economy.  The company did not scale because of a single funding event.  It scaled because it built the right foundations: a wide network of 3S centres, an end-to-end product ecosystem, a financing solution for the market it was trying to serve, a training and certification infrastructure, and a strong supply chain.Kairous Capital, backed by Jelawang Capital under the Emerging Fund Managers’ Programme, recognised this when it funded Aonic. The investment thesis was not speculative.  It was grounded in a company that had already demonstrated it could deliver measurable outcomes at scale, in sectors that matter to national development.Cheong is direct about what that backing made possible.  “We help farms work faster, more accurately, and with full visibility. VC capital enabled faster expansion. Our investors also provided guidance on go-to-market strategy, introduced us to other funding partners, and shared valuable external perspectives from their experience with other portfolio companies.”Aonic’s path reflects what is possible when determination, innovation, and the right partners come together. That is the kind of capital deployment that builds an ecosystem over time.