Singaporean internet start-up MyRepublic is raising $150 million to fund its expansion into Australia and other global markets, with plans to hire a local managing director by the end of the year. 
MyRepublic has forced prices down in its home market of Singapore by offering super-fast broadband at very low prices. Its outspoken co-founder and chief executive, Malcolm Rodrigues, is highly critical of the Coalition's changes to the $41 billion national broadband network.
But despite the criticism, Mr Rodrigues detailed his plans to shake up the Australian internet market by selling products here from mid-2016 onwards. The move could have a major impact on profits at companies like TPG Telecom and Telstra as the NBN becomes their main supplier.
He told Fairfax Media that the company's lean operations meant it used a "1-5-10" plan. It needs a 1 per cent share of its target market to break even and expects to hit 5 per cent with a stretch goal of 10 per cent.
MyRepublic will target five Australian capital cities in its first major push and sell 100-megabit-per-second broadband services with unlimited downloads for $80-$90 per month.
"We typically need 10,000 to 15,000 customers per city [to break even]," he said.
"The first city will take 18 months [to break even] and the second city might take 15 months, with the third city taking 12 months just because you start to get market momentum.
"We'll probably put a team on the ground this year and we'll go through all the NBN approvals and testing and then we'll start laying in the infrastructure with some points of interconnect up and running at the beginning of next year."
MyRepublic had originally planned to hit Australia in 2014 and later revised this date to late 2015. But he said both of these targets were delayed because of the NBN's slow construction progress.
The telco saves money by focusing on customers directly connected to fibre networks. Despite the delays, however, Mr Rodrigues said NBN would reach enough homes and businesses by the middle of next year to make it worth his investments.
"We think we have our strategic partners in place and we're doing a fundraising now for the end of the year," he said. "It's $150 million and that's to fund some of these grow-fast aspirations."
Mr Rodrigues is a man to take seriously. The Toronto, Canada-raised executive was previously a vice president of StarHub International and Wholesale, which went on to win the bid to set up and run Singapore's version of the NBN.
One of his fellow co-founders, Greg Mittman, was a senior executive at Alcaltel Lucent, the French company that supplies the NBN in Australia.
When asked about competition during his exit interviews, Telstra's outgoing chief executive David Thodey said it was tier-three disrupters including MyRepublic that the company worried about more than TPG or Optus.
But MyRepublic will have a fight on its hands in Australia thanks to industry consolidation, which has created a market dominated by just four big telco players.