Vietnam’s AI Hay pits local brains against ChatGPT’s brawn

Duc Tran, CEO of AI Hay, describes his product with a compelling analogy: If ChatGPT is a baby who thinks in English, then his is a baby who thinks in Vietnamese.

ChatGPT is by no means a baby, though. And from the very start, he has known there’s no beating the product that helped ignite the global AI frenzy and inspired him to build AI Hay, a Vietnamese AI-powered Q&A app.

Still, Tran’s venture, fresh off a US$10 million series A, is banking on the idea that there remain segments of the Vietnamese language and culture that ChatGPT can’t or won’t bother to reach. He thinks this gap presents a promising business opportunity.

From left: Duc Tran (CEO), Chuong Nguyen (CTO), Hiep Nguyen (COO)/ Photo credit: AI Hay

For context, it’s been a while since a Vietnamese startup raised a sizable series A at the pre-revenue stage – rarer still for one built entirely in Vietnamese.

This isn’t just bold talk – AI Hay’s 40-person team has the credentials to back it up. Tran and the startup’s CTO, Chuong Nguyen, previously led product, growth, and AI at Zalo, Vietnam’s homegrown chat app with 100 million users – virtually the country’s entire population.

While critics say Zalo never lived up to its WeChat-sized potential, it’s still standing in a market where foreign chat apps operate freely – a testament to its survival instinct.

“We left Zalo in early 2022 after ChatGPT made us realize AI was a real opportunity,” Tran tells Tech in Asia. “We wanted to build something new, but Zalo was just too big for that. We felt that starting fresh would move us faster.”

This track record of the executive team is invaluable. It’s worth noting, however, that the fight is different in AI. The pace is brutal, and no one really knows the rules yet.

Not quite a chatbot

AI Hay reports 15 million downloads, 120 million monthly queries, and around 1 million daily users.

In comparison, ChatGPT is estimated to reach only a single-digit percentage of Vietnam’s population, though there are no official figures on its active users or paid subscribers. Gemini, on the other hand, gets 4.4% of its global traffic from the country, which translates to roughly 17 to 18 million people.

After more than a decade, Zalo has managed to fend off foreign rivals. Now, AI Hay has to convince users it’s the local alternative worth choosing – despite ChatGPT’s command of the Vietnamese language and Google’s native-language reach.

The AI Hay team is banking on its edge in “cultural nuance and context,” which means going hyperlocal.

See also: Zalo beat WhatsApp in Vietnam. It now wants to be the country’s top super app

Will Vietnam choose AI Hay?