Global investors' appetite for Vietnam edtech market grows

Online tutoring platform Vuihoc raised $2 million in its latest funding round led by BAce Capital, a venture fund backed by Japanese giant Ant Group, and with the participation of Vulpes Venture, DT&Investment & Colopl Next and Nextrans.

Founded in 2019, it now has over 400,000 learning materials including online courses, video lessons and quizzes. It hopes to reach one million subscriptions by 2024.

English self-learning platform Edupia raised $14 million in a series A round led by Jungle Ventures with eWTP Capital (a venture fund under Alibaba and Ant Financial) and ThinkZone Ventures participating.

Edupia has five million users, including 400,000 paying students.

Tran Duc Hung, who founded the company in 2018, said Edupia is on track to exceed its $100 million revenue target in the next three years.

Most of its users are in Vietnam, but it is also expanding into other Southeast Asian markets like Indonesia, Thailand and Myanmar, and adding more subjects, including math and coding.

Many foreign edtech firms also plan to expand their operations into Vietnam.

In August, Singapore’s leading online learning platform Geniebook announced plans to enter Vietnam, making the country its second market in Southeast Asia outside Singapore after Indonesia.

According to Geniebook, the expansion comes on the back of a profitable 2020 when it recorded an annual recurring revenue of $10 million.

Launched in 2017, it is an edtech platform that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to personalize learning by recommending assessment concepts and questions based on students’ strengths and challenges.

Vietnam has a significant market for education, with 16 million students in primary and secondary schools and 1.7 million in universities.

It is one of the fastest growing markets globally and its value would hit $3 billion next year, industry researcher EdTech Agency said in a report in July.

"We believe there is significant potential for Vietnam's edtech market," BAce Capital managing partner Benny Chen said after the fund invested in Vuihoc.

"Vietnamese culture highly emphasizes education and the online format has achieved wider adoption during the pandemic."

Giang Tran Minh Thanh, Vietnam country manager KVision, the investment arm of Thai KBank, said the education market has great potential since Vietnamese parents are willing to spend big money on their children.