VNG CEO Le Hong Minh (Photo courtesy of VNG)Hanoi (VNS/VNA) – Two founders of Vietnamese tech companies werelisted in the Southeast Asia’s top 30 tech founders this year by technology andstart-up platform techinasia.com.
They are Tran Ngoc Thai Son, founder of e-commerce platform Tiki, and Le HongMinh, CEO of VNG Group.
Southeast Asia is home to many smart and inspirational founders who havestarted companies that have fetched millions or even billions of dollars infunding.
In the past two years, funding raised by the region’s start-ups rose threefold,soaring from 2.52 billion USD in 2016 to 7.86 billion USD in 2017.
Southeast Asia’s top 30 tech founders list features entrepreneurs who run astart-up and they are ranked based on their personal track record and theirfirms’ public data (funding, revenue and valuation), using data from the pasttwo years.
They are placed into three groups based on their company’s size: theup-and-comers, established entrepreneurs and industry giants.
Singapore is home to the top 20 founders while Indonesia has four.
Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia each have two in the list.
Le Hong Minh, VNG CEO, an established entrepreneur, turned his interest ingaming into a sprawling business. He helped make VNG into one of Vietnam’s largestinternet companies, focusing on online gaming and content, social networkingand e-commerce.
VNG has been expanding rapidly since its establishment in 2017. It reported arecord 186.3 million USD in revenue and 41 million USD in net profit last year,up 41 percent and 70 percent year-on-year, respectively.
Tran Ngoc Thai Son, founder of Tiki, an e-commerce platform that sells morethan 300,000 products in 12 categories, is among the outstanding up-and-comers.
Two years after foundation in 2012, Tiki raised funding from CyberAgentVentures and became the only e-commerce company to receive capital fromJapanese Sumitomo Corporation. It also has drawn interest of Chinese e-retailerJD.com, which joined its series C funding round in 2017.
It claims to have the lowest return rate among all Vietnam-basedecommerce companies, and that it has grown in triple-digit rates sixyears in a row.
Tiki is planning to raise a series D funding round to finance the developmentof new services and mobile applications.-VNS/VNA
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