In 2016, Cheah pulled a small team together to tour Silicon Valley and the region’s VC circuit. “I was the guy with a tie, corporate guy” he says, but the exposure led to Sunway setting up iLabs in 2017 and its corporate VC arm in 2018 and start looking into Southeast Asian tech startups.
The mindset shift was simple: act like an operator, partner like a platform. Cheah’s confidence in Malaysia’s exit paths underpins this stance. “Our public markets are more aggressive than the VCs,” he argues, pointing to a risk-taking culture on Bursa where many new listings this year have done well.
US-based medtech startup HistoSonics is transforming cancer treatment with the Edison System, its FDA-cleared medical device that uses hitotripsy — a breakthrough ultrasound technology that uses sound waves to destroy tumours without heat, radiation or surgery. Backed by Horizons Ventures, the technology is already being adopted by hospitals across the US. With expansion into liver, kidney and other applications underway, HistoSonics showcases how robotic precision and advanced ultrasound technology are reshaping healthcare.
Moonshot AI, one of China’s fast-rising AI innovators, develops Kimi LLMs designed for real operational use. Its newest model, Kimi K2 Thinking, is a leading open-source 4.0 AI model engineered for complex workflows such as coding, debugging, test generation, planning, and autonomous multi-step task execution. With 1 trillion parameters, a 256K context window, and built-in real-time search, Kimi K2 Thinking delivers strong reasoning and reliable tool use. It also includes
capabilities that coordinate hundreds of tools automatically, along with a unique “thinking-while-executing” mechanism that lets the model reason and act simultaneously—performance levels that early reports suggest rival and in some tasks surpass those of GPT-5.