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Coffee Star’s founder on building a cashless, cloud-connected Coffee ATM
The New Straits Times profiled engineer Raja Ahmad Fauzan Raja Hassan, who described how Coffee Star designed a cashless, cloud-run Coffee ATM for Malaysian conditions and served frontliners during Covid-19.
KUALA LUMPUR, 6 July 2020 — The alert reached Raja Ahmad Fauzan Raja Hassan on his phone: a Coffee Star kiosk at the airport was running low on beans. He dispatched a refill team. Before they got there, the machine was already cleaning itself, a cycle he had set going remotely through Coffee Star’s own app.
That scene opened a New Straits Times profile of Coffee Star’s founder and chief executive, published in the paper’s technology pages. The paper cast him as a technopreneur. Trained as an engineer, he had launched Coffee Star Malaysia a little over a year before, on a simple premise: properly made coffee at a price most Malaysians could manage.
Malaysia’s coffee scene was already busy, he told the paper, and he saw no point in joining it by the usual rules. Building his own machine was how he chose to be different.
The ideas were his; the hardware came from many places. A Swiss grinder and an Italian canister were among the components, and final assembly took place in China. Apple, he pointed out, works on the same model, keeping design and manufacturing in separate places.
He called the concept “connected coffee”. Every machine reported to the cloud, which flagged to technicians when a refill was due.
Cash had been out of the picture for roughly a year. Customers paid by card or by mobile e-wallet, and that is where the Coffee ATM name came from. Covid-19 gave a purchase with no notes or coins to handle extra appeal.
Local conditions shaped the design. Insects were one local hazard, so the cabinet was sealed with no openings at all, and a magnetic lock kept the door shut until the cup was finished. Customers ordered entirely on a touch screen, with nothing physical to press, and could set the sweetness to taste, which helped anyone keeping an eye on their sugar.
He and his suppliers and partners spent roughly 10 months on the design, and putting cloud technology inside the machine was the toughest piece, the paper reported. Payment was a project of its own. Airport customers arrive with wallets from all over the world, so the company signed up e-wallet providers from home and abroad, and by mid-2020 each machine could take 18 different payment modules.
The beans came through a partnership with Ronny Kiekens of Puro Fairtrade Coffee, a brand whose Fairtrade-certified coffee was tied to protecting rainforest with the World Land Trust.
By then its machines were pouring coffee in shopping malls, a technology park, a heart hospital and a broadcaster’s studio, as well as in both terminals of an international airport. Coffee Star machines at two frontline sites, one of them a hospital, were also serving frontliners free coffee. Between April 2020 and the time of the report, they poured more than 10,000 cups.
Offices could use the same system to run coffee allowances for their staff, the paper noted, because it also accepted QR codes. Looking further ahead, he was considering dispensing by facial recognition. “Whatever you can imagine can be built,” he told the New Straits Times.
Today Coffee Star runs Auto-Baristas at more than 114 locations across Malaysia, and on 24 September 2026 it launched its fully managed Office Coffee Service at MIHAS 2026.
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