FPT launches venture capital arm for tech startup

At Techday 2015, Corp has officially announced FPT Ventures – FPT‘s first venture capital arm. The advisory board of the arm includes FPT leaders and experts. CTO of FPT Trading Tran Huu Duc was appointed concurrently as CEO of FPT Ventures.

FPT Ventures will target seed and series A investments in local startups with available resources including infrastructure, technology and financial capacity.

FPT has for years been Vietnam’s leading player in launching and supporting startups, and boasts of several success stories including e-commerce site Sendo.vn, advertising platform Ants.vn, streaming service FPT Play, music portal Nhacso.net, Gostudybooking.com – an information website for people searching for studying abroad, and household service viecnha.vn.

The fund will focus on startups valued less than $1 million and majored in technologies in technologies related to internet, mobile, small and midsize business (SMB), health, education, traffic and SMAC. “Young businesses will be provided with both capital and technical assistances via FPT Ventures Fund”, said Mr. Duc.

FPT’s first venture capital arm gets much attention from the community.

Vietnam is one of the fastest growing startup markets in Southeast Asia. However, by the end of the third quarter in 2013, there are around 61,000 startups in the country demanding support from the state and other organizations.

"Besides capital, young businesses are in need of creative environment, teams of experienced personnel from business plan, marketing, media to sales", said FPT Chairman Truong Gia Binh. “With such favorable conditions and available technology resources, FPT will bring about opportunities in order that talents can launch new products". “FPT plans to earmark around USD 3 million every year for FPT Ventures”, revealed Mr. Binh.

FPT CTO Nguyen Lam Phuong said that creativity was a driving force for sustainable development of every business in the future. The existing trends such as SMAC and IoT were moving on very strongly, and opening up lots of opportunities for business community.

With a desire to make Vietnam become a startup nation, like Israel, FPT is cooperating with international funds and incubators in order to create a vivid startup environment and aiming at 5,000 tech firms by 2020.

Submitting your ideas at: http://fptventures.vn/ and click Join.