Building Borong in Public

B2B procurement in Southeast Asia is a large and underserved problem. Most of the publicly available thinking about eProcurement is written for Western markets with very different supplier ecosystems, regulatory environments, and organisational cultures. There is very little honest documentation of what it actually takes to build a procurement platform for the SEA market: the technical complexity of integrating with the ERPs most commonly used here, the cultural dynamics of procurement reform in Malaysian and Indonesian organisations, the challenge of building a two-sided marketplace where both buyer adoption and supplier onboarding need to happen at the same time.

We share our building process because we think it is useful to the procurement teams, startup founders, investors, and operators who are trying to understand this market. And because transparency about how a platform is built is part of how we build trust with the buyers and suppliers who rely on it.

Borong's Build in Public updates are written by Aizat Rahim, CEO & Co-Founder, and published as a running series on LinkedIn. Newest first — select a post to read it in full.

Building a B2B marketplace in Southeast Asia involves navigating a set of market conditions that are specific to this region. Supplier fragmentation is high: the businesses selling to enterprises in Malaysia and Indonesia are predominantly SMEs and micro-businesses, many of whom have never sold through a digital channel and require active onboarding support rather than a self-service signup flow. Buyer adoption of digital procurement varies enormously: a GLC with mature finance infrastructure is very different from a growing SME that still runs procurement through WhatsApp. And the regulatory environment, including e-invoicing mandates, halal certification requirements for relevant categories, and the local content obligations relevant to certain sectors, adds complexity that purely B2C marketplace models do not face.

These are the problems we are documenting in Build in Public. The notes here are useful for anyone building a marketplace, a B2B SaaS product, or a procurement tool in Southeast Asia, and for buyers and suppliers who want to understand the reasoning behind how the Borong platform is designed.