(Article based on July 9, 2026 Favoriot Statistics)
What does it take for a platform built in a small office in Malaysia to end up with a user in Suriname, another in the Cook Islands, and one in Greenland?
The honest answer is: nobody plans for that. You plan for the first ten users. The rest is what happens when you keep showing up, year after year, and the internet does the rest.
I went back into the Favoriot user registry recently, not the pitch deck version of our story, the raw one. 10,984 registered accounts. 141 countries. Records stretching from a single Tuesday morning in March 2017 to a signup that came in at 12:50am today. It felt like the right moment to read the numbers as a story rather than a spreadsheet.
Day one was quieter than you’d think
The very first entry in the system is dated March 31, 2017, 9:36am, a demo account, ours, set up to make sure the platform actually worked before anyone else touched it. Seventeen days later, the first real user outside our own team registered. By the end of that year, Favoriot had 136 users. Nearly all of them Malaysian. Nearly all of them people we could have named from memory.
2018 wasn’t much louder: 191 new signups, still a story confined mostly to home ground. If you’d shown me that number in 2018 and asked whether this platform would one day count users on every inhabited continent, I’m not sure I would have bet on it.
Then 2019 happened
Something shifted. New signups jumped from 191 to 2,097, an eleven-fold increase in a single year, still the single biggest year of growth Favoriot has ever recorded. But the more telling number isn’t the user count. It’s the countries. Favoriot went from being registered in 6 countries to being registered in 92 countries, 86 new countries added in twelve months. That’s not a marketing campaign. That’s a platform quietly crossing borders because IoT builders were finding it, using it, and telling the next person.
That single year did more to internationalize Favoriot than the two years before it combined.
The year the world stayed home, and found us anyway
2020 tells its own story. Total new signups dropped from the 2019 peak, as you’d expect in a year when everything slowed down. But look at the mix: 38.3% of that year’s new users came from outside Malaysia, the highest international share in Favoriot’s history, before or since. When the world went indoors, remote monitoring, sensors, and connected devices stopped being a “nice to have” conversation and became the conversation. People searching for IoT platforms that year found their way to us in Brazil, in Ecuador, in Nigeria, in places we had never run a single ad.
The long, steady climb
What followed wasn’t another explosion, it was something harder to pull off: consistency. 1,825 new users in 2021. 1,411 in 2022. 1,246 in 2023. 1,105 in 2024. 1,006 in 2025. And 706 already this year, with months still to go. Nine straight years without a single one falling to zero. That’s not a viral moment. That’s a platform that keeps earning its next user the same way it earned its first, by working.
Home, and how far from home
Malaysia remains the anchor. Roughly 8 in 10 users with a known country still call Malaysia home, and that’s exactly as it should be for a platform that grew up here. But sitting alongside that anchor is a footprint that now reaches 141 countries and every populated continent:
Asia beyond our own borders accounts for over 1,200 users, led by India (365), Indonesia (244), the Philippines (141), Thailand (72), Pakistan (51), China (40), Singapore (34), Vietnam (30), and Bangladesh (29). Europe has quietly built up 260 users across 35 countries, Portugal, Germany, France, the UK, Russia, and Poland among them. The Americas contribute close to 300 users spanning 26 countries, from the United States (59) and Canada (29) down through Brazil (47), Mexico (39), Ecuador (27), and Argentina (17). Africa’s 180 users span 29 countries, Egypt, Tunisia, Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco, Algeria, and Sudan among them. And even Oceania, the smallest slice, has 33 users across 7 countries, Australia and New Zealand among them.
That’s not a company with an “international strategy” slide. That’s a platform that IoT builders in 141 countries decided, on their own, was worth signing up for.
Why this matters more than the total
It would be easy to just say “almost 11,000 users” and move on. But the number that actually matters is the 141, because it means the problem Favoriot set out to solve in Malaysia was never a Malaysian problem. It was an IoT problem, everywhere devices needed to talk to each other and someone needed to make sense of the data. Kuala Lumpur just happened to be where we started solving it first.
Nine years ago, day one looked like a single demo account and a hope that it would work. Today it looks like 10,984 people across 141 countries who decided to build something on top of what we started. If that’s not proof that a good idea built in Malaysia can travel, I’m not sure what would be.
The next chapter is still being written, one registration at a time.
Dr. Mazlan Abbas, Founder, Favoriot
Source: Favoriot platform user registry, March 2017 to July 2026 (10,984 registered accounts, 141 countries represented).
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