500 Startups, Saison Capital join Vietnamese investment app’s $2m round

After spending several years in Silicon Valley, Vietnamese engineer James Vuong decided to return home in 2008 to become the vice president of investments at IDG Ventures, Vietnam’s first tech VC fund.

Four years later, he founded an ecommerce company called Lana Group that was later acquired by chat app Line. After that, with the experience he gained as an engineer, venture capitalist, and founder, Vuong built a company in financial space called Infina.

The Infina team and James Vuong (back, third from right) / Photo credit: Infina

Launched in January 2021, Infina is an app that allows users to invest as low as US$25 in assets like savings, term deposits, mutual funds, and fractionalized real estate. It can also get commissions from other financial companies for distributing those products. Vuong told Tech in Asia that he also has plans to expand the app to support stock investments.

The app currently serves tens of thousands of users. It counts some of the largest fund managers in Vietnam, such as Dragon Capital, Mirae Asset Fund Management, and Viet Capital Asset Management as its financial partners.

Recently, it raised US$2 million in a seed round. Saison Capital, Venturra Discovery, 1982 Ventures, 500 Startups, Nextrans, and executives at Google and Netflix participated in this round.

Out of the 97 million people in Vietnam, only 3.2% invest in stocks. However, according to Vietnam Securities Depository, the number is growing. In the first five months of 2021, around 500,000 new trading accounts were opened.

According to Vuong, most of investment platforms in Vietnam don’t have apps. People still have to contact financial companies or agents to place investments. On the other hand, some available investment apps were created for professional traders, so it was bloated with too many features and data.

“Infina wants to target millennials [and] first-time retail investor. That’s why we created an app that is not too sophisticated for them,” Vuong says.

Infina has become one of several apps that aim to capitalize on the investment app hype in Southeast Asia. Previously, Indonesian investment platforms like Ajaib and Stockbit have attracted huge amounts of funding from local and foreign investors.

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Infina will use the fresh funds to fuel the company’s growth and expand its product offerings. To date, it has around 25 employees, with most of them working in the tech and product division.