ZUS Coffee

ZUS Coffee flipped the coffee game on its head. Instead of charging customers for fancy fixtures and rental space, they focus on what matters—the quality cup in your hand. They control everything from bean to cup, which lets them price specialty coffee so it's actually affordable.

The app is their superpower. Three taps—enter address, pick your drink, done. Pick up or delivery, no middleman markup. They launched in Malaysia in 2019 with one outlet and one app. By April 2020 they'd shipped 150,000 cups. Now they're at 1,000 outlets across Malaysia, Philippines, and Thailand as of early 2026. They even partnered with AirAsia to serve coffee in the sky.

What makes them tick: they're explicitly a tech-driven coffee chain. Their whole model is online-to-offline. They launched a ZUS Academy, got Halal certified, and expanded into ready-to-drink products and instant premixes so people can access ZUS everywhere, not just at outlets. They're hiring across HQ (marketing, tech, finance, supply chain, creative) and retail.

They're not trying to be luxury—they're trying to be the default choice for daily coffee, wherever you are in Southeast Asia.