FPT, Vietnam’s biggest tech corporation, launches FPT Ventures, a $3M seed fund

Nguyen Lam Phuong, CTO of FPT Group, speaking on FPT’s imperative to innovate and foster the startup ecosystem.

At the very top of the chain of Vietnam’s tech startup industry is FPT. In its annual report last year, FPT announced that it hit US$1.65 billion in revenue in 2013. That’s considerably more than any other tech company in Vietnam, partly because FPT does everything from software outsourcing to infrastructure, to telecommunications to education. It’s also 27 years old. That means this megalithic giant has considerable history and influence over Vietnam’s technology direction.

Thus, today’s announcement that FPT would be starting its own venture capital arm with FPT Ventures is a huge step for the corporate giant and a potential ripple effect for Vietnam’s startup community.

The new fund would be over US$3 million per year of investment dollars earmarked for seed and series A investments in Vietnamese startups. Investments would target companies with valuations below US$1 million and fund at a minimum of US$50,000. Do the math – that’s a potential 60 seedstage startups per year. Apparently, FPT is working with Silicon Valley investors for the initiative but has yet to specify who. FPT would act as an investor and accelerator by providing cash, resources, as well as their wealth of technical and management experts. The only caveat is that FPT asks founders to commit at least five years to building a big company. But FPT guarantees that it will finalize every investment decision within four months of the submission date.

And the ripple effect is already starting. FPT Ventures has already made select investments internally. In other words, the fund started out testing investment with its own people who wanted to leverage FPT resources to build new startups. This includes:

• Sendo.vn – An ecommerce marketplace
• Ants.vn – A big data platform for advertisers
• FPT Play – An online and mobile video streaming service
• Nhacso.net – A premium music portal
• Viec Nha – A mobile platform to call plumbers, maids, and maids to your house (Uber-style)
• Gostudybooking.com – A platform for people who want to study abroad
• FShare – A Dropbox-like platform that leverages FPT’s server infrastructure

The startups are representative of the breadth of FPT’s business licenses and technical expertise. They operate as separate, independent entities from FPT’s main corporate branches, which means they have separate profit and loss statements and management structures. The main thing is they leverage FPT’s existing architecture to help scale.

Projects like Nhacso, Sendo.vn, and FPT Play have been in operation for over a year now, which has given FPT Ventures insight into acceleration and incubation. With the FPT Ventures initiative, the team will now be looking outward into the ecosystem for potential investments. That means, if there are any Vietnamese startups looking for investment, you might want to start knocking on FPT’s door.

Beyond these broad categories, FPT is also looking very seriously at digital solutions across a swathe of industries including healthcare, transportation, mobile, SME, voice recognition, and more. The leadership at FPT, specifically chairman and founder Truong Gia Binh, has long been harping on themes related to software eating the world and internet of things and that FPT needs to be at the forefront of these trends as they shift the landscape of Vietnam.

CTO of FPT Group, Nguyen Lam Phuong, one of the key people leading the FPT Ventures initiative, is keen on pushing FPT out of its corporate malaise. In today’s press conference he mentioned that FPT should look to other corporates like Barclays for inspiration in a transition from corporate to more startup investment and innovation.