Minister Nguyen Manh Hung Meets Vietnam’s AI Startup Community: 4 Key Insights from the Dialogue

On January 16, GenAI Fund had the privilege of hosting an intimate dialogue session between Minister of Science and Technology Nguyen Manh Hung and Vietnam’s AI startup community in Hanoi.

The session was not just a meeting — it was a candid, two-way exchange designed to understand the real challenges startups face and to share the Minister’s vision for Vietnam’s AI ecosystem.

Here are the key takeaways.

🎯 “A Startup’s Greatest Asset Is Finding the Right Problem”

The Minister opened with a powerful reframe: startups are not SMEs.

The difference? Startups exist to solve problems that don’t yet have solutions. They’re not optimizing existing models — they’re creating new ones.

“If you position yourself as a SME competing on capital, product, or customer base — you’ve already lost. Those are battles you can’t win.”

Instead, the Minister urged startups to focus on what they can own: finding problems big enough and hard enough that incumbents aren’t solving.

🚀 How Can Startups Work with Big Corporations?

One mindset Minister Hung addressed: the tendency to view startups as SMEs or as hired labor for large corporations.

“Startups were born to surpass big corporations — not to remain as outsourced vendors.”

This doesn’t mean startups should avoid working with corporations. It means the relationship should fuel growth, not dependence.

Contrary to popular belief, the Minister emphasized that early-stage startups don’t just need funding. They need a real environment to test, fail, and iterate.

“What startups need most in the early stage is not capital, but a real environment to experiment — to deploy, make mistakes, and fix them with real data.”

He called on large enterprises to become “first customers” and “guinea pigs” for startup solutions, giving them access to real-world problems and data to refine their products. In return, corporations benefit from cutting-edge innovation without the constraints of internal R&D.

This open innovation model — startups bring agility, corporations provide scale and validation — is exactly the ecosystem collaboration Vietnam’s AI sector needs.

🌏 Vietnam’s AI Edge: Localized Innovation

The Minister acknowledged that Vietnam might not have the same advantage as global AI superpowers on foundational research.

But that’s not the game to play.

“The right direction is to focus on creative applications — bringing available technologies to solve specific problems in Vietnam’s economy and society.”

This aligns perfectly with what we see at GenAI Fund: the biggest opportunities lie in applying AI to local, high-context problems — from logistics to legal and public sector use cases.

💰 Policy Context: 70% of Science Budget to Support Enterprises & Startups

Beyond the dialogue, the Ministry of Science and Technology has signaled a significant shift in resource allocation. According to the Ministry, approximately 70% of the annual science & technology budget will be prioritized for enterprises, including startups, to conduct R&D tied to market needs. Evaluation criteria will also shift toward commercialization potential and product revenue.

The Minister also highlighted the concept of “mini unicorns” — companies valued at ~$100M — as a realistic, achievable goal for Vietnamese startups, aiming to build a strong base of mid-sized but globally competitive companies.

⭐ What This Means for the Ecosystem

This dialogue signals a clear shift in how Vietnam’s government views AI startups:

✅ From passive support → active co-creation

✅ From funding-first → sandbox-first 

✅ From chasing unicorns → building mini-unicorns 

✅ From competing globally on tech → winning locally on application

At GenAI Fund, we’re energized by this direction. It validates our thesis: AI startups in Southeast Asia will win by solving real, high-context problems in their markets — with speed, creativity, and local insight.

About GenAI Fund

GenAI Fund is Southeast Asia’s first GenAI-focused venture fund and innovation platform. We connect AI startups with enterprises to co-create solutions, run accelerator programs like FastTrack AI, and host community-driven events like GenAI Builders Meetup across Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

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