Sheng Yeo

Business: OrionVM

Age: 25

State: New South Wales

Sheng Yeo admits that while his cloud services company OrionVM may not provide a “cool” product, it’s something that underpins a lot of applications that businesses are providing for their customers.

It’s also something that sees the company pulling in annual revenues “in seven figures” just three years after OrionVM was formed and two years after it launched its first product.

“We solved a problem for business,” Yeo says.

Some of the business applications that OrionVM’s infrastructure supports include Sydneybuses.info, m.shop.vodafone.com.au and dlink.com.au.

Yeo says businesses had struggled to create their own cloud services, which OrionVM is able to provide.

According to its website, OrionVM’s technology delivers the world’s fastest cloud.

Yeo says the company’s growth has been largely through word-of-mouth between clients and partnerships based on high quality service and support.

“Cloud is a very rapidly growing industry,” he says, adding that it’s growing faster than larger players can sell into.

OrionVM is now on the path of international expansion and has recently opened an office in the US, where Yeo, who has accounting and IT degrees and was a finalist in the Ernst & Young 2013 Entrepreneur of the Year program, is now based for 80% of his time.

“The future for us is growing the business,” he says.

“We’re going to roll out multiple data centres in the US and then in Asia and Europe as well as opening offices to support our clients.”

Yeo’s advice for fellow young entrepreneurs includes don’t always listen to people when they say you can’t do something and make sure your business idea has some value.

“If you’re not solving a problem for a customer, no-one’s going to pay you for your solution.”

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