Five years ago, PETRONAS gave us at Borong a chance to support part of its digital procurement. They’re still with us today, and this year they’ve doubled down.

We live in tail spend: the thousands of small purchases nobody writes a strategy paper about. Gloves, safety boots, lab consumables, toner. Each order is tiny. Across a group the size of PETRONAS, it adds up to serious money and even more human hours spent chasing quotes and raising POs.

Building for this was never glamorous. Enterprise procurement moves slowly. Onboarding vendors who have never touched a platform, plugging into systems older than our company, months of approvals before a single order flows. Add fundraising and 400+ investor conversations to keep the lights on while all of that played out. There were quiet stretches where I wondered if any of it would land.

Some raw truths from five years of doing this:

Savings open the door: Price is always the first conversation, and we do deliver savings. It’s also the easiest thing for anyone to copy.
Automation keeps the door open: A buyer runs their fiftieth RFQ on the platform and realises what they got back was their week. Quotes come in, prices get compared, the PO gets raised, and the requester goes back to their actual job.
Transparency is what nobody asks for, and everyone needs: Tail spend is messy because it’s invisible. Who bought what, from whom, at what price? On Borong, it sits in one place, comparable and auditable. That visibility is worth as much as any discount.
Trust compounds slowly: We kept the service running and the vendors paid through changes in teams, systems and priorities. Five years in, PETRONAS uses more of what we build than ever. No pitch deck shortcuts that.

None of this happens alone. Since Azrul came on board as CTO in May, product has been shipping at a pace I haven’t seen in years. Tan Wui Li has been buried in corporate restructuring, and everything else a CFO carries quietly. Aimil, Muhammad Zaid, Mohamad Hakam, Izhwan, and Ariff run sales and operations, which at our size is everything the customer touches. Ahmad Rafiezie holds treasury together, the job that decides whether we’re around next quarter. And honestly, hundreds of others at Borong have been supporting us through ups and downs.

Nine months of growth, most of it messy, but the best stretch we’ve had in years.

As usual, still here & still rowing :)

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