Company AIREI Sdn. Bhd.3 more
Company AIREI Sdn. Bhd. SSM 201801033310 Offices Malaysia · India Founder DOSH Grade 1 steam ticket

The company

Born on an estate.
Now retrofitting the mills.

AIREI retrofits AI onto mills that are already running — vision grading, plant automation, traceability. The Star called the first one, Minsawi in Perak, the world’s first palm oil mill to adopt AI.

Who Surendran Kuranadan, Founder & Chief Executive Officer Runtime 6:00

The founder

Three generations in
the estates.

Surendran Kuranadan runs a palm oil mill and a plantation of his own.

AIREI company profile

The family

Third generation in palm oil.

Surendran founded AIREI and runs it. Born on a palm oil estate: his forefathers were brought in by the British to work the plantations, and both his parents worked in palm oil.

Mechanical Engineering at UNITEN, then a Masters in Chemical Engineering at UPM.

Source: Asia Palm Oil Magazine, Jan–Mar 2024, page 60.

The ticket he signs for

A steam ticket makes one named person legally answerable for a mill’s boiler. At AIREI that person owns the company — a certified Grade 1 Steam Engineer under the Department of Safety and Health (DOSH) Malaysia since 2012. Your sterilizer conversation is with somebody who has signed for one.

We don’t want people to just sit down doing repetitive jobs. That’s what we are trying to eliminate.
Surendran Kuranadan Founder & CEO, AIREI · The Edge Malaysia
An engineering work room at night with nobody in it: two monitors carrying abstract blue technical plots, a whiteboard of diagrams behind, an anglepoise lamp pooling warm light over open notebooks and a mug.

Why the ticket matters

A mill runs on pressure vessels, and the law holds one named person answerable for them. At AIREI that person owns the company.

The film

Six minutes of the
actual plant.

One company film. Storage tanks, mill floor, nursery, control room, grading container — closing on customer interviews and the launch podium.

A palm oil mill at blue hour seen from a low rise: silver storage tanks and a lit boiler house picked out in warm amber worklight against a deep blue dusk sky.

Ask, and it is yours

The whole six minutes, uncut, sent as a file the same day.

Drone, macro and interview coverage, at 1920 by 1080. Ask and the uncut file comes back the same day.

The people

Looking up the trunk of a mature oil palm into its crown. The trunk fills the right of the frame, clad in blunt sawn frond-base stubs with moss and small ferns rooted in the gaps between them, and the fronds radiate out to the left with the sun flaring through them against a hazy blue sky.

The room

There is no sales floor in this company. The largest room is the one with the monitors in it.

Three quarters of this
company is technical.

Of 49 people, 37 are technical. Four are in sales. That is why an engineer answers the phone.

The heads of department

Studio portrait on a plain warm-white ground: a man with a shaved head, a short white beard and rectangular black-framed glasses, arms folded, in a black T-shirt printed with the AIREI wordmark, a watch on his left wrist.

Surendran

Chief Executive Officer

Studio portrait on a plain warm-white ground: a man with grey-flecked dark hair laughing broadly, in a black zip-up hooded jacket carrying a small white AIREI wordmark on the chest over a dark collared shirt.

Rajendira Perasad

Head of Products

Studio portrait on a plain warm-white ground: a smiling woman with a small red bindi and long dark hair falling over one shoulder, her body turned slightly away from the camera, in a black AIREI T-shirt and a fine gold chain.

Dhivvia

Head of Finance & Human Resources

Studio portrait on a plain warm-white ground: a young man smiling with his eyes narrowed, in a white long-sleeved shirt with a chest pocket and a small blue AIREI logo above it. His shirt is close in tone to the backdrop, so its outline is faint.

Yugaataran

Head of Sales and Marketing

Studio portrait on a plain warm-white ground: a man with short curly hair and a trimmed moustache and beard, grinning at the camera, in a black T-shirt printed with the blue AIREI wordmark.

Micheal Joswa

Head of Artificial Intelligence

Studio portrait on a plain warm-white ground: a man with dark hair and thin-framed glasses looking straight at the camera without smiling, in a black T-shirt printed with the blue AIREI wordmark and its descriptor line.

Vedateri

Head of Technical

37

Technical

Vision, controls, IoT and project delivery. The people who stand on the plant.

5

Business development

Scoping and commercial structuring for retrofits.

4

Sales and marketing

Four people, for a few hundred mills.

3

Finance and HR

The back office.

Two men in matching white AIREI-branded shirts at a dark table in front of a wall of screens carrying dark dashboards with amber and cyan tiles and tables of figures too small to read here. The nearer man is speaking with his hands clasped; the second sits out of focus behind him. An open notebook covered in handwriting lies on the table.
Where a review in front of the plant dashboards Note the notebook is still a working instrument

Partners and record

A person in a hard hat climbing a caged steel ladder on the outside of a mill vessel, seen from below and behind against a bright sky.

What each name is worth

Every name below carries the exact strength of its claim.

Named, with the strength
of each claim attached.

Here is the list, with what each relationship actually is.

Instrumentation and engineering partners

A retrofit is only as good as what it measures with. AIREI works with Danfoss for drives and automation, KROHNE, Endress+Hauser and VEGA for instrumentation, plus Fine Instrument Technology, TECNOVA and Optimaxx.

Ask for the full equipment list at the site assessment.

Government and industry bodies

AIREI works with MDEC, the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation, whose head of digital agriculture technology calls AIREI one of the ecosystem partners MDEC works with. The Malaysian Palm Oil Certification Council (MPOCC) wrote to AIREI on 6 October 2020 to thank the team for the successful completion of MSPO Trace, and recorded in the same letter that AIREI was then developing the SPOC Verification Module for the Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB).

The council’s chief executive signed that letter, and it is reproduced whole.

Partners and customers

Ten names on AIREI’s partner and customer list:

  • Malaysian Palm Oil Certification Council (MPOCC)
  • Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB)
  • Sime Darby Plantation Berhad
  • IOI Edible Oils Sdn. Bhd. Kernel Crushing Plant
  • United Plantation Berhad Jendarata Palm Oil Mill
  • Perak Motor Co. Sdn. Bhd. (Palm Oil Division)
  • Norangkasa Enterprise Sdn. Bhd.
  • Sena Traffic Systems Sdn. Bhd.
  • Malaysian Palm Oil Green Conservation Foundation (MPOGCF)
  • Sime Darby Plantation Research Sdn. Bhd.

Ask us about any of them and we will put you in touch.

Who has stood next to the work

  • 01 The Deputy Prime Minister, YB Dato’ Sri Haji Fadillah bin Haji Yusof, visited the AIREI booth at the AI FFB Grading launch and was photographed with the founder.
  • 02 The MPOB Director-General, Datuk Dr Ahmad Parveez Hj Ghulam Kadir, and Deputy Director-General Dr Ramle Moslim were photographed with the founder at the same event.
  • 03 The Minister of Plantation and Commodities, YB Datuk Seri Johari Abdul Ghani, officiated the Smart Mill launch on 19 Nov 2024, reported in The Star.

Ask for a reference call

We will put you on the phone with a mill running this today. Minsawi is named in full, with the press behind it.

We name a client once they have given us written permission; the home page carries those we can name.

A block of young oil palms on a bank above a red-earth estate road. Cut fronds lie windrowed down the bank, a hand-dug drain at its foot holds muddy water, and a weathered timber post stands in the gravel at the roadside. Behind the young palms a row of mature palms closes the skyline under a flat white sky.

Reported by the press

The launch was carried by The Star, 19 November 2024.

Next step

The fastest way to judge us
is to ask a hard question.

A site assessment is where these claims meet your plant. Or test us first: ask for the film, the founder’s steam ticket, or a reference call.

An engineer’s desk at night: a closed laptop, a notebook open at blank pages, a mug and a small brass ornament under one warm desk lamp.

What an assessment is

Bring your annual tonnage, your current OER, and your worst month for downtime. You leave knowing whether a retrofit is worth pricing — or a straight no.