10 startups in Vietnam that have reached over 1 million users

Vietnam is full of startups these days with hackathons and events galore. But before all this hype and momentum came along, Vietnam quietly produced a number of successful mobile-oriented startups out of the woodwork. Here’s a list of just a few in both the mobile and non-mobile spaces that might interest you. The benchmark I’ve come up with here is that these tech companies (some of them can no longer be considered startups) have reached the million-user milestone. They all, via Facebook growth strategies, word of mouth, or brute force marketing, have been able to get more than a million users, and that in itself is a feat of strength.

You’ll notice right away that most of these companies specialize in games, but some have tread the road less traveled and gone on to interesting things like productivity and photo sharing.

1. Greengar

Greengar is one of the most successful mobile app companies coming out of Vietnam. It was once an app studio which built a plethora of apps from productivity to games, but since entering the 500 Startups program in Silicon Valley, it has focused solely on its most successful app: Whiteboard. The app allows users to collaborate on a shared whiteboard with text, paintbrushes, and more. The app is mainly targeted at educational institutions, but the CEO, one of Vietnam’s only female tech startup co-founders, says it can also be used in a business setting for meetings.

2. Zalo

VNG is no longer a startup. It’s one of Vietnam’s biggest tech giants, but Zalo is worth mentioning here. It is basically Southeast Asia’s only large contender against the East Asian chat apps like Line, KakaoTalk, WeChat, and the foreign competitors like Viber and Whatsapp. Zalo is likely Vietnam’s second-most-used chat app with almost seven million users to date. That’s growth that only occurred in the last year – Zalo did not even have a million users in January this year. The explosive growth has been in part due to VNG devoting so many of its resources to mobile (over 80 employees), but mainly because of the aggressive marketing resources the huge company put into the project.

3. Not A Basement

The mobile app company recently released a big upgrade to its landmark Fuzel app. Rather than update the current app completely, the Not A Basement team decided to keep the current app as a Legacy app and encouraged users to download its all new Fuzel app. The new app has already skyrocketed to Apple’s new “Best New Apps” and features a chic design. The original Fuzel app has gotten over a million downloads and Not A Basement studio’s MangaRock, an app that allows users to read their favorite mangas, has also received over a million downloads.

4. Divmob

Considered to be one of the most successful mobile gaming companies in the global space, Divmob has produced over ten games for both Android, and iOS. Their most successful is Ninja Revenge, which garnered over one million downloads in 21 days. It got up to two million downloads in the first month and in total has over four million downloads. My personal favorite has been Zombie Age, which allows users to kill zombies.

5. Nhom Mua

6. AppVL

7. Project Lana

8. Money Lover

9. MC Corp

10. Colorbox