Ganesh Kumar Bangah

Ganesh Kumar Bangah is widely known as a serial entrepreneur, startup investor and technology industry leader. Many observers within the tech industry continue to view him as ‘the Bill Gates of Malaysia’, a description first coined by the New Straits Times and reinforced by Business FM and various other media outlets.

There are good reasons for this. Ganesh was the Ernst & Young Technology Entrepreneur of the Year in 2012 and recognised as one of Asia’s most influential people according to Society Magazine 2015. He was also regarded as one of Southeast Asia’s Top 30 Tech Founders by Tech In Asia in 2016, and described as ‘one of the most inspiring Malaysian technology entrepreneurs’ by Top 10 of Malaysia.

In 2020, Ganesh acquired and subsequently became the Executive Chairman of Australian-listed Xamble Group Limited that owns the largest influencer platform in Malaysia, Nuffnang, with its community of 20,000 influencers throughout Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. Due to various acquisitions and innovative approaches for the digital growth industry, Xamble has today become synonymous with being ‘Asia’s Pioneering Digital Growth Ecosystem’.

The Netccentric-Nuffnang Group acquisition followed on the heels of Ganesh having founded the Commerce.Asia Group in 2017.  An ‘All In One e-Commerce Ecosystem’, Commerce.Asia has grown tremendously within the past four years, resulting in a database of over nine million SMEs across seven countries with over 48,000 sellers that sold over RM6.4 billion worth of products in 2020.

Turning the clock further back to when Ganesh was in his 20s, he had founded MOL Global Inc. when he served as its Chief Executive Officer for 15 years and was certified by the Malaysia Book of Records as the youngest CEO of a Malaysian public listed company. Ganesh had subsequently built MOL to become Southeast Asia’s leading online payment gateway, before MOL became the region’s first internet company to be listed on the NASDAQ market of the United States in 2014.

Ganesh is today the Honorary Chairman of the National Tech Association of Malaysia (‘PIKOM’); and a former Board Member of the Malaysian Global Innovation & Creativity Centre (‘MAGIC’). He also continues to be Advisor to PIKOM and Chairman of PIKOM’s think-tank arm called Future Digital, a role he describes as his ‘contribution to nation-building to steer the industry along the right path’.

Ganesh is guided by the belief that the world’s challenges can be solved through entrepreneurship. In his own words, his life mission is “to build the next generation of entrepreneurs”.

He believes that true entrepreneurs are not just motivated by money alone. Instead, it is all about creating impact to improve societies while building a better world for our children, and the generations to come.