"I took maybe a one month break to travel across Japan, across all the Zen temples, to really sit down and think about what I wanted to do with my life."
Right after national service, before university even started, Joe decided he wanted to spend his career on sustainability — a thread that runs through an early VR startup (acquihired by Facebook), smart padlocks, and now modular cold storage in Manila.
"This whole process was a pain — it was like walking through mud."
It took Polar Cold nine months to legally register in the Philippines and another six before they could accept card payments. Joe now argues the grind is a defense in itself: it's "gonna be one hell of a journey for anyone trying to come into this space."
"I run a Facebook ad and I get like 70 leads in three hours. I'm done for today."
Polar Cold's original model — financing custom-built cold rooms — ran on 6-to-8-month enterprise sales cycles that didn't bring in enough cash. Switching to a rented, month-to-month modular box collapsed that into a same-day, self-serve signup at roughly 20 cents a lead.
"If your cold room is at minus five and the next hour it's still minus five — is it working or not? You can't really tell."
The industry standard is a human walking in once an hour to jot down a number. Polar Cold instead streams 15–16 variables per room in real time — the only way to catch a slow refrigerant leak or a struggling compressor before it becomes a spoiled shipment.
"The padlock gives me unprecedented control over who comes in and out of the codes."
Joe built high-spec smart padlocks at his previous company; at Polar Cold he repurposes that same tech for one-time pin codes — like the customer who overstayed his rental and only got a fresh code, and his goods back, after agreeing to pay up.
Joe Khoo opens the conversation with a photo Arjun couldn't stop thinking about: Manila traffic, half the road underwater. That image is the whole thesis of Polar Cold. The Philippines floods on a near-monthly typhoon cycle, large trucks are banned from entering cities during set hours, and the traditional cold-chain answer — one mega-warehouse near the port, serving everyone — simply doesn't reach the small distributors and food SMEs who make up the bulk of the market. Their fallback has been leaky, unreliable chest freezers. Polar Cold's modular units — about the footprint of a large fridge, holding roughly two tons of stock, the equivalent of five chest freezers but stackable — rent for around 23,000 pesos a month with maintenance included, filling the gap between a chest freezer and a warehouse lease.
The business almost didn't start this way. Polar Cold was built inside ENGIE's corporate venture studio, originally as an energy-efficiency financing play: build the most efficient cold room possible, then finance it for customers. That model's 6-to-8-month enterprise sales cycles weren't generating enough cash, so the team pivoted hard into a fast, self-serve rental model — and it changed everything operationally. Two months before this conversation, Polar Cold had half its boxes sitting empty; by the time of recording, they were running 90–95% full, with roughly 24 boxes deployed and a plan to reach 89–100 by year-end. Joe credits the shift to treating the search for the right model "like looking for love" — the financing business was a real product, but the rental model is the one the market actually wanted, converting Facebook-ad leads at roughly 20 cents apiece.
The technical backbone is what makes the whole thing defensible: every cold room streams 15–16 variables — pressure, current, exhaust heat, and more — so Joe's team can catch a slow refrigerant leak or a struggling compressor days before a customer notices. Energy savings vary by configuration: Joe is explicit that the largest figures apply only to full container builds, with the smaller rental units saving closer to 15–20%, and up to 50% when replacing an especially inefficient setup. The same data-first instinct extends to hardware Joe brought over from his prior company's smart-padlock work, repurposed now as a payment-enforcement mechanism as much as a security feature. Polar Cold is heading into a new fundraise on the back of real unit-economics progress — capex payback period has fallen from 22 months to about 10 — with the explicit goal of hitting break-even by year-end.
Joe Khoo's Highlights:
→ Co-Founder & CTO of Polar Cold, a modular, on-demand cold storage rental business born inside ENGIE's corporate venture studio
→ Modular units rent for ~23,000 pesos/month, holding ~2 tons of stock — roughly five chest freezers' worth, in a smaller footprint
→ ~24 units deployed across the Philippines today, targeting 89–100 by year-end; occupancy climbed from ~50% to 90–95% in two months
→ Capex payback period cut from 22 months to ~10 months, heading into a new fundraise to reach break-even
→ Cold rooms monitored on 15–16 real-time variables to predict failures — like refrigerant leaks — before they cause losses
→ Previously built high-spec smart padlocks and worked on an early VR startup later acquired by Facebook