Vietnam’s Appota scores series C funding as mobile gaming booms

Photo credit: fotokita / 123RF.

Vietnam-based Appota today announced it secured an undisclosed sum for its series C round from two prominent investment funds in South Korea – Korea Investment Partners (KIP) and Mirae Asset Venture Investment.

The round brings Appota’s valuation on track towards the US$50 million mark and its total funding close to US$10 million, the company tells Tech in Asia.

Appota, headquartered in Hanoi with offices in Ho Chi Minh City, Jakarta, and Singapore, is a big mobile game publisher in Vietnam, with a social gaming network and a gaming news media portal.

Half of the nation’s 350 million app downloads are games.

The company was right on betting on this space from the beginning because Vietnamese mobile users now spend a chunk of their time on the internet playing games. The mobile games market in Vietnam has grown phenomenally, making up a third of the whole market in Southeast Asia, according to an AdSpruce report. Reportedly half of the nation’s app downloads as of last year were games, followed closely by social media and music.

Citing its own data, Appota estimates the Vietnam games market to be worth about US$600 million; mobile accounts for 60 percent of that and is growing at 35 percent per year. “We aim to capture 20 percent of the mobile market, or US$65-US$70 million per annum,” founder and CEO Do Tuan Anh tells us.

While games are its core business, Appota serves as an ecosystem of mobile products. It has an advertising platform that drives installs for apps and helps developers make money on their traffic, a marketing rewards app, and a payment solution, which provides a cost-effective payment gateway for its partners and an ewallet for end-users.

The company generated US$15 million in revenue in 2016. However, Tuan Anh says, “we are not profitable yet because investments are still being made.”

They expect to turn profitable this year, “though that is only one goal,” as the team intends to keep investing in growth.

Expanding footprint

Appota founder Do Tuan Anh. Photo credit: Appota.

Appota has over 15,000 developers, advertisers, and merchants as partners, and more than 30 million users, of whom 5 million are active on a monthly basis. That’s a huge reach, considering Vietnam has 50 million internet users out of its 95 million population. Behind this popularity is the company’s ability to solve a major pain point for publishers. In Vietnam, bootlegged and cracked games are rampant. Most phones are jailbroken or illegally unlocked from a telco. Stores that sell smartphones preload them with apps from bootlegged accounts so people have grown accustomed to not paying for apps.

Appota’s growth since its inception in 2011 has “broken the wall of uncertainty and boosted our confidence to invest,” notes Sang-Ho Park, executive director for KIP’s investment division.