More about Yienyee Soh

Yienyee is the cofounder and Group COO at AVANA - a social commerce enabler that empowers more local businesses in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia to bring their products online and scale to compete on a global level Yienyee graduated with a Bachelor of Psychology (Hons) from HELP University College, Malaysia. During her university years, she founded an online fashion aggregator called A Shopaholic’s Den - pioneering a strong community of online sellers in Malaysia. 

Yienyee’s passion for helping local businesses to grow has powered her successful career trajectory. The young entrepreneur started organizing offline events to complement the online community. It was during this time that Yienyee discovered the challenges facing online merchants: there was little technology to automate routine tasks such as updating inventories, managing orders, and tracking deliveries. 

This was the spark that drove Yienyee to develop a solution to empower small businesses In 2016, Yienyee teamed up with Luqman, to build AVANA as an affordable and scalable end-to-end platform for local businesses to automate their business operations, tap into social media as discovery and sales channels as well as partner with logistic and payment Today, with a team of more than 80, AVANA empowers more than 100,000 businesses of all sizes and KOLs across the region to grow their business and is looking to empower more across Southeast Asia

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Featured speaker at previous eChai events:
Startup Growth Panel - Stories from Malaysia
CoRise SEA Summit
Founders and startup folks who joined past eChai startup events

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Jaydip Parikh - Chief Everything Officer at Tej SolPro
Jaydip Parikh
Chief Everything Officer at Tej SolPro
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Rushabh Shah - Managing Partner - STIR Advisors
Rushabh Shah
Managing Partner - STIR Advisors
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Pankaj Bhimani - Founder, 58miles
Pankaj Bhimani
Founder, 58miles

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