Ministry of Science and Tech in Vietnam pours $110 million into startups

Forget the $400,000 that was promised to build startups in Vietnam last month. Now, the Ministry of Science and Technology in Vietnam has secured $110 million, in a program called FIRST, mostly from the World Bank to pump into Vietnamese startups.

The FIRST program specifically aims to “foster scientific research, improve and advance the use of technology, encourage creativity, and ignite technology business for the purpose of improving the economy.” The program will last from 2014 until 2019 and it is not clear yet where specifically this money will go. $10 million had to be put up by the IDT investment fund, whose money is tied closely to investors in Kazakhstan and Russia.

For those not in the know, Russian investors have played an increasingly significant role in Vietnam’s startup ecosystem with big investments in search engines such as CocCoc and Wada, which both spent over $15 million each in the last two years on securing Vietnam’s search engine market. This project will allow them to be even closer to their customers.

It’s rumored that some of the $110 million will go to building an accelerator in Vietnam, but details have not been released yet. According to head minister Nguyen Quan, the ministry believes leveling up Vietnam’s technology ecosystem will be seminal to bringing Vietnam’s economy back in gear.

In early 2009, Paul Graham said it would cost a city $1 billion to create their own Silicon Valley anywhere in the world, so the Vietnamese government is just $890 million short. It’s a big step forward, as long as the money is allocated in the right place.

[Source: VNexpress)

(Editing by Paul Bischoff)