Over the past weeks, our Investment Manager Nhat Anh sat on both sides of Vietnam’s innovation market: as a speaker at Vietnam EdTech Expo 2026 in Hanoi, and as a judge at Startup Wheel 2026.
One room told us what the state is asking for. The other showed us what founders are actually building.
What the demand side is signaling
The EdTech Expo brought together department-level officials from the Ministry of Education and Training, the office of the National Council on Education and Human Resource Development, faculty leadership from major universities, and operators across the sector. Three themes came through from the ministry side.
Speed is now an explicit requirement: digital transformation executed faster, with short deadlines attached to specific deliverables, and two priorities named directly: human capital and data.
The direction is shared platforms rather than more standalone products. Shared digital learning resources and shared school management platforms, consistent with Resolution No. 57-NQ/TW dated 22 December 2024 of the Politburo, which calls for building shared national digital platforms. The stated rationale was direct: shared infrastructure to avoid duplicated spending.
Procurement is shifting toward leasing services and infrastructure. This sounds administrative but may be the most consequential signal for company economics, since it converts one-off budget allocations into recurring spend.
What the supply side is building
Judging at Startup Wheel put a wide cross-section of that same period in front of us, across sectors well beyond education.
The range was what stood out. Nutrient recovery from industrial wastewater. Distributed biotech infrastructure for agriculture and circular bioeconomy. Digital twins for cultural heritage. Craft village production organized into a working supply chain that includes artisans and workers with disabilities.
These are sectors where technology has taken longer to arrive. What we saw were founders pointing serious engineering at parts of the Vietnamese economy that have been underserved by it, with domain understanding that only comes from time spent in the field. Several arrived with paying customers and operating numbers already on the table, which says something about how far these teams had gone before entering.
Reading the two together
Three things are now visible with useful specificity on the policy side: what infrastructure gets built, how the state intends to buy, and the pace being asked for. On the founder side, capability and domain depth are both improving. Where those hold together, the binding constraint shifts toward execution. That is where good private companies tend to earn their place.
Do Ventures backs founders building for scale in Vietnam, in many of the sectors above. Execution and domain depth are what we look for. If you are building products that reach millions of everyday users, we would like to hear from you.
