Dana Impak

Khazanah Impact Innovation Challenge

Furthering our support of Malaysia’s start-up ecosystem, we launched the Khazanah Impact Innovation Challenge (KIIC) in 2021, a 10-week business competition organised by Khazanah, via the Dana Impak fund. KIIC provides visionary entrepreneurs and innovative startups an opportunity to pitch ideas, refine their go-to-market plans, and receive mentorship from experienced founders.

The challenge aims to discover and support new business models that contribute to Khazanah’s goal of Advancing Malaysia, crowdsource ideas to address pervasive problem statements and deliver impactful economic potential for the country.

Dana Impak is pleased to bring together partners from various sectors to explore opportunities to collaborate with, and tap into the wealth of talent and expertise among Malaysian startups and MSMEs within the agri-food space. As climate change poses an increasing threat to food security in our country, we hope that through this challenge, we can offer the necessary support and wide-reaching platform to attract capital for innovative and sustainable solutions for the identified theme, which is aligned our long-term strategy of Advancing Malaysia.

Dato' Amirul Feisal Wan Zahir

Managing Director, Khazanah Nasional

Khazanah Impact Innovation Challenge

This year’s KIIC is themed around “Tackling the Climate Challenge for Malaysia’s Food Security”. It aims to achieve the following:

  • Uncover innovative agrifood startups and Micro-, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (MSMEs),
  • Boost participants’ readiness and knowledge in navigating fund-raising to take their business to the next stage of growth; and
  • Profile/showcase Malaysia based agrifood startups and MSMEs to the broader investment community.

Ten (10) finalists of KIIC2023 have a chance to receive an award of up to RM500,000 each in the form of grants. Khazanah and its partners reserve the rights on the final grant amount, and disbursement schedule to the shortlisted finalists, subject to the execution of the KIIC Grant Agreement by the finalists. The KIIC2023 Demo Day would provide a platform for finalist(s) to pitch for potential equity investments from Khazanah and its funding partners; and/or debt funding from our debt financing partners.

This year’s KIIC is organised by Khazanah in partnership with its programme partner, Plug and Play APAC (“PNP”), outreach partners, Impact Circle and Cradle Fund’s MYStartup, and funding partners Gobi Partners, 500 Global, and Agrobank.