Anphabe, Vietnam’s LinkedIn, receives strategic investment from RGIP in Japan

As far as we can tell here at Tech In Asia, Vietnam has already accumulated over 20 investments and exits in just 2013 alone. Now we can add Anphabe, Vietnam’s top network for professionals, to the list.

Anphabe, which was started by Thanh Nguyen, one of Vietnam’s only female tech founders, now has over 85,000 users on its platform. This makes Anphabe the leading network for professionals in Vietnam. The company, which was founded in 2011, also hosts events, a forum, and helps with head hunting for local companies.

Anphabe’s new investor is Recruit Global Incubation Partners, , the venture capital arm of Recruit Holdings, a recruit company out of Japan. According to Thanh, the deal shows promise for the market:

The strategic investment from a global leading partner like Recruit Group one more time proves that our relentless effort is acknowledged.

Today’s investment marks the third acquisition or investment in the online recruitment sector of Vietnam. The other ones, earlier this year, were the number one recruitment site, Vietnamworks, which was acquired by en-Japan and KiemViec, Vietnam’s number two recruitment site, which was acquired by Career Builder. Clearly, foreign investors are quite keen on hitting Vietnam’s still growing online recruitment.

The investment also comes right off the heels of last month’s investment from Sumitomo into Tiki.vn, one of Vietnam’s leading e-commerce sites. In other words, Japanese investors are deeply interested in Vietnam’s market. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw more investments in the very near future.

(Editing by Charlie Custer)