Vietnam-focused investor Touchstone Partners launches new incubation program

Touchstone Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm in Vietnam, has launched the Touchstone Fellowship Program, an initiative that provides customized incubation for startup founders to develop their ideas.

Through the program, the VC will invest between US$50,000 and US$100,000 in convertible notes with “founder-friendly” terms to kickstart the startups’ ideas. This is a departure from the typical US$1 million seed investments of the firm, which announced its inaugural US$50 million fund in April.

The Touchstone team / Photo credit: Touchstone Partners

The selected startups will undergo an incubation period of three to four months, where the Touchstone team and its network of advisors will help the founders with several aspects of their businesses such as launch pathways, validation, product-market fit, and customer acquisition.

The program is open on a rolling basis, and Touchstone is looking for founders who aspire to solve pressing problems in Vietnam.

“Through the small checks we provide to founders, they will be able to move along faster and deeper to prove their market fit and validate the business model. We saw how even a small amount of investment could help startups grow at least 3x,” said Bobby Liu, Touchstone’s director of entrepreneurs-in-residence. Liu previously ran Topica Founder Institute, an accelerator program of Topica Edtech Group.

So far, two startups have received funding from the Touchstone Fellowship Program: Debion, a business-to-business marketplace focused on Vietnam’s construction industry, and Autotable, a no-code automation software-as-a-service platform built for regional small and medium-sized businesses.

Established earlier this year, Touchstone is led by Khanh Tran, former founding partner of VinaCapital Ventures, and Tu Ngo, co-founder and chairwoman of edtech platform Yola.