If you’ve walked past the Atelier Centre at Edusphere lately, you might have noticed something new has taken up residence — and unlike most of the neighbourhood, it’s open at 3 in the morning.
DRE Coffee quietly launched its first-ever commercial outlet there in late March, and the buzz hasn’t really died down since. The café, tucked into Block D4 of the Atelier Centre along Jalan Atelier 2, runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. For a city where late-night food options have always been a mild frustration, that alone is worth paying attention to.
But the hours are just the starting point. DRE Coffee’s founder, Danish Adam Mohd Fadzil — all of 22 years old — has built the brand around a model he calls “Drink, Refer and Earn.” The idea is straightforward: every transaction generates cashback, referral rewards, and contributions to a community fund. Customers who refer others unlock a five-tier rewards structure. Staff get incentive payouts too. It’s less of a café and more of a small economy built around a cup of coffee.
“Customers can enjoy cashback, a five-tier referral system, staff incentives, and a community fund from every transaction. This approach breaks the norms of the traditional coffee industry by distributing value back to customers, staff, and the community.”— Danish Adam Mohd Fadzil, Founder, DRE Coffee
The idea came to Danish while he was studying in Seattle — a city that probably has more strong opinions about coffee per capita than anywhere else on earth. Watching friends work as baristas and café managers, he became interested not just in the product but in the economics behind it. Why does so much of the value in the coffee industry sit at the top? DRE Coffee is his answer to that question.
Back home in Malaysia, he started small — experimenting within a student community before gradually formalising things into a proper brand. Edusphere was a deliberate choice for the first commercial launch. The development, built by HCK Capital Group on 24 acres of freehold land, is home to the University of Cyberjaya and sits within walking distance of MMU. The surrounding residential blocks house students, young professionals, and remote workers — exactly the kind of people who might need a decent flat white at midnight.
Technology keeps the operation consistent without being gimmicky about it. DRE Coffee relies on high-spec automated machines and AI-assisted processes rather than a full team of baristas, which is partly what makes 24-hour operations viable. Quality, Danish says, doesn’t drop when the shift changes — because in the traditional sense, shifts don’t really exist.
In its early phase, the team is targeting between 300 and 500 cups sold daily, ramping up to 700–1,000 once operations stabilise. Those are serious numbers for a single outlet, but then again, Cyberjaya’s commercial strip has seen this work before — McDonald’s at Edusphere had queues at the drive-thru for weeks after its own opening.
DRE Coffee’s target crowd is pretty clear: Gen Z and millennial customers who are active online, students from the nearby universities, office workers looking for something better than vending machine coffee, and the night owls who currently have very few options after midnight. It’s a demographic that Cyberjaya has in abundance, spread across its residential developments and tech company campuses, and one that has historically been underserved when the sun goes down.
Locally, DRE Coffee joins a growing F&B scene at Edusphere that already includes McDonald’s and KFC — though it’s fair to say the concept sits in a rather different lane. Further expansion is planned across Malaysia, and Danish has flagged something genuinely surprising: a second outlet in the United States by 2027, which would bring the brand back to the city where the whole idea started.
Whether the community-reward model builds the kind of loyalty it needs to sustain itself long-term is still an open question — most ambitious café concepts are. But the launch itself has landed well, and for Edusphere’s commercial strip, a 24-hour café is a genuinely useful addition to the neighbourhood.
