Johor steel distributor, built to US$28 million without outside equity, arranges its first committed source of outside capital, available following a U.S. listing, to develop Matcon, a construction materials platform aimed at a Southeast Asian market worth more than US$220 billion a year and still run largely on phone calls, paper and handshake credit

JOHOR BAHRU, MALAYSIA – Media OutReach Newswire – 25 September 2026 – GrabSteel, the Malaysian steel distributor founded by Barry Lee Wee Chan and Alvis Chong, has entered into definitive agreements for a committed equity facility of up to US$100 million with White Lion Capital LLC, a United States multi-strategy family office. The facility is the first outside equity commitment in the company's history and is intended to fund the development of Matcon, GrabSteel's construction materials platform, as the company builds toward a listing on a United States exchange. Under the facility, and subject to the terms and conditions of the definitive agreements (including the listing of the company's shares on a United States exchange, the effectiveness of a registration statement covering the resale of the shares, and customary volume, pricing and ownership limitations), White Lion Capital has committed to purchase GrabSteel shares over the term of the agreement, in tranches and in amounts at the company's election. The structure lets GrabSteel take capital as Matcon grows rather than in a single round. A US$220 billion market that still runs on phone calls Southeast Asia's construction output exceeds US$465 billion a year and is on course for about US$1 trillion by 2034. The materials inside that flow, from rebar and cement to roofing, pipes and tiles, are worth more than US$220 billion every year. At least US$130 billion of that moves through the channel GrabSteel knows best: distributors, stockists, traders and hardware shops, almost none of whom run any part of the transaction on software. The way this material is bought has barely changed in thirty years. A price quoted by phone in the morning is stale by lunch. Credit is decided on a relationship rather than a record. Delivery is chased over messaging apps, and a paper delivery note has to find its way back to an office before anyone gets paid. A single order can involve several quotations, a credit negotiation, more than one transporter and days of calls before the material reaches the site with the right documents. Three forces are now landing on that trade at once. In Johor, a data centre construction boom and the Johor-Singapore Special Economic Zone are lifting demand for building materials of every kind. Across the region, Indonesia is building a new capital and Vietnam is planning a US$67 billion high-speed rail spine, in one of the largest building cycles anywhere outside China and India. And the technology to read a bill of quantities from a site photograph, price credit from an order history or route a crane truck across a corridor now costs close to nothing per transaction. The founders are not planning to win the whole market. Their plan needs a single-digit share of the intermediated channel. Built to US$28 million without outside equity GrabSteel arrives at this point with a profile that is rare for a company taking its first outside equity: it has grown this far without any. Revenue rose from about US$6.6 million in the 2022 financial year to about US$11.5 million in 2023 and about US$28 million in 2024, more than fourfold in two years and a compound annual growth rate above 100 percent, with a profit in each of those years. The two founders remain the company's only shareholders. The company supplies hot rolled coils, hot rolled steel bars, cold rolled coils, galvanised steel, steel plates and alluminium coils to more than 100 customers, among them manufacturers, fabricators, roll formers and contractors across the construction and industrial supply chain. It built that business inside the trade described above. The next step is to make the process itself work better. "Working in steel trading has shown us where customers lose time: obtaining comparable quotations, coordinating deliveries and collecting the documents they need," said Barry Lee Wee Chan, Co-Founder of GrabSteel. "Our ambition is to bring these activities together through Matcon. We will start with our own operations, prove that the platform works in real transactions, and build from there." Matcon: bringing materials procurement into one platform Matcon is being developed as GrabSteel's construction materials platform. It brings enquiries, quotations, order records and delivery documentation into one connected workflow, so that a purchase which today runs across chat threads, phone calls and paper can be followed from first enquiry to signed delivery note in one place. The initial development priorities are:

• AI-assisted enquiries. Converting photographs, voice notes...