INVOKE Malaysia wants to join the ranks of big data companies in Asia predicting elections around the region, said its founder, Rafizi Ramli.

He said that the next step for the analytics firm, after its success in predicting the 14th general election’s results, was to offer its services to Thailand and Singapore.

“Invoke has a lot of know-how and capability to go commercial. A lot of people thought it was propaganda (at first). I hope now they understand that when we say data, we mean we are working on big data.

“In the business and commercial world, big data is a big thing and is the future. I think Invoke is far ahead (in big data) compared to other competitors in the country,” Rafizi said in a recent interview with Malaysia Decides.

The PKR vice-president started Invoke in 2016, using his own money as seed funding before getting enough public donations to continue.

Ahead of GE14, Invoke conducted surveys by telephone using an interactive voice response system.

It also organised thousands of volunteers and trained them as polling agents, counting agents, and election campaigners for phone and door-to-door canvassing for votes.

He said the outfit would now offer its services such as data mining, surveying, and market research to organisations and companies.

“We did predict fairly and accurately how 14 million people would vote. If we could predict the most difficult question, it would be quite easy for us to predict who buys what and what colour (items).”

In GE14, Rafizi said Invoke focused on marginal seats in peninsular Malaysia, where Pakatan Harapan won 42 out of the 44 marginal seats contested.

“You cannot be gunning for Putrajaya when you know 30 seats will be the decider, yet treat these seats like any other seats.

“You have to focus on them a lot more than others. For the past two years, I was focusing on the 44 seats,” he said.

PH won the elections with 122 seats out of 222 in Parliament, wresting Putrajaya from Barisan Nasional which only won 79.

Rafizi reiterated that Invoke was independent despite its links to PKR through him, and insists that it would not have worked if it was biased towards a particular political party. Invoke had to be free from political bias, he said, if it were to be a successful data analytics outfit.

“It would have not worked if it was part of PKR. I realise people don’t like political parties. It is a lot easier to get traction with me as a person compared to political parties.”

The former Pandan MP did not contest in the elections because of a pending court charge for leaking bank accounts in his corruption expose of the National Feedlot Corporation.

Rafizi said he had no plans to make a comeback to politics anytime soon, as he would focus on developing Invoke.

When asked if his name was on the cards for a senatorship in the new PH government, he immediately rejected it.

“Nope. I’ve made up my mind. I have a duty to the guys here (at Invoke). They are good kids.I need to make sure that they have a place to stay here.

“We have to spend at least one year to make sure Invoke survives commercially and can retain all the skills, knowledge, and expertise.” – May 27, 2018.