Vietnam’s M&A market is booming, but technology is barely in it. That gap has become the defining question for its digital economy.

In a separate interview with TNGlobal, Quest Ventures’ senior analyst Linh Ha read it as friction and youth. An ecosystem where early rounds and acqui-hires are only now laying the groundwork as Vietnam is still waiting for its bigger deals.

XYZ Foundation co-founder Alex Phan, by contrast, argued that the challenges were structural, pointing to capital being crowded out by real estate and finance, banks’ inability to value intangible technology assets, and the IPO route being ill-suited as an initial exit.

In an interview with TNGlobal, BeginGuru Founder and CEO Hai Nguyen, stressed the gap comes down to one thing: investors still see no credible path to exit, so capital waits. The cheap-money era is over, and startups must live on customers’ money, not investors’.

Below are the edited excerpts:

In earlier interviews, Quest Ventures’ Linh Ha read the gap between investments and technology mainly as a timing problem: Vietnam’s young ecosystem will naturally mature into bigger M&A once startups reach real profitability. XYZ Foundation’s Alex Phan, on the other hand, stressed that capital-heavy sectors like real estate and finance are “crowding out” startups. What are your opinions?

Drawing on 15 years of hands-on experience as a startup founder, a board member and coach to founders, and an investor in startups, I believe the funding gap in Vietnam’s tech sector stems largely from investors not yet seeing a viable path to exit. That makes them hesitant to deploy capital.

In recent months, my LinkedIn has drawn growing interest from new investors around the world, including from China, India, South Korea, Europe and the US, who want to connect because they are looking for opportunities in Vietnam.

I am glad to help them understand the market and introduce them to startups. The reality, however, is that they rarely find opportunities that are good enough, and the sectors they are interested in often lack a credible exit route. As a result, most stop at the research stage.

If professional foreign venture investors behave this way, it is easy to understand why domestic investors, who prefer safe and steady returns, are wary of startups.

Still, I believe the Vietnamese government’s support for entrepreneurship and innovation will produce more strong startups, while the domestic consumer market continues to grow quickly. These are encouraging signals that should draw more capital into startups and open up more exit opportunities.

Some have recommended startups to follow “back-to-basics” principles, such as no longer chasing the IPO dream and focusing on real revenue. What are your recommendations?

During the cheap-money years of 2021 and the stronger growth period of 2015–2019, investors favored startups that painted a big picture and operated in the hot sectors of the moment, such as the sharing economy, blockchain and now AI. With capital cheap, money was burned in exchange for growth and market share.

That era has passed. With interest rates high in 2026 and likely to stay elevated through 2027, funding is tightening. Startups can no longer live on investors’ money and must return to living on customers’ money. Companies that fail to create real value that customers are willing to pay for will shut down.

When I founded Canavi, an HR-tech startup, it depended on investors and I closed when it could no longer raise capital.

Today, at every company I have founded, now sit on the board of, or have invested in, the priority is a product that earns money from customers. We always build the plan so that the company survives on customer revenue. Capital that we raise helps us grow faster, but if we cannot raise it, the business is not affected.

Vietnam is backing large “national champions” while tightening tax, e-invoicing and IP rules on SMEs and household businesses. For startups, does this help?

Tighter regulation may initially cost startups time as they adapt. Over the longer term, though, serious businesses will be better protected and will compete on fairer terms.
Take HOPE Iki Healing as an example, a D2C health-tech startup selling detox powders and teas, where I sit on the board. Before the state tightened rules on tax, intellectual property and counterfeit goods, many competitors made cheap fake products and flooded the market with advertising, harming consumers’ health and eroding their trust.

Since the start of 2026, however, many of these counterfeiters have been caught and shut down. Customers have returned to reputable businesses with good, verifiable products. That is why we support the Vietnamese government in this period of resetting and standardizing the market.

One of your recent achievements is Nina Ecom Center (NEC) raising capital through Beacon Fund’s Australian-backed “Investing in Women” program. From your experience on boards and in coaching founders, do women founders in Vietnam face a genuinely different fundraising path?

For this round, we chose Beacon Fund because the two sides share a similar investment and business philosophy. In addition, the capital comes from the Australian government’s Investing in Women program, which will help NEC maximize its credibility, influence and social impact.

From my work coaching startups and sitting on their boards, I see that male and female founders have equal chances when raising capital from investors, as long as they can show that their startup fits the fund’s philosophy and offers a reasonable exit path.

AI is now reshaping how startups run — automating administrative work and freeing founders to focus on product and customers. In fundraising specifically, where do you see AI delivering the most value?

As a fundraising coach who uses AI in my day-to-day work, I can assess a startup’s potential. I used to read every pitch deck and analyze it manually, which was laborious. Now founders upload their pitch decks and three minutes later the AI returns a detailed score across dozens of criteria that I defined. From there I can decide whether to keep working with that founder. This saves me about 80 percent of my time.

I can also build a fundraising content library. Over 15 years in this field, I have written nearly 400 articles on fundraising. With that body of expertise, AI has helped me expand that into 750 in-depth, SEO-optimized articles.

I believe that if we make good use of AI, our fundraising and investing work can become many times more efficient than before.

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