Vietnam’s AI Awakening: These 8 Startups Are Putting The Country On The Global AI Map
Just like other Asian countries, Vietnam in a bid to compete with its Asian counterparts is now spurring economic innovation with AI. To emerge as an AI leader in Southeast Asia, and become a pioneer in AI products, the country has adopted a distinctive breakthrough strategy and drew up a plan on AI research and development. According to the Boston Global Forum, Vietnam starts at a low point for AI, and faces a difficult environment and challenging conditions, minimal investment, weak technology sector and lack of human resources. However, through its breakthrough strategy, the country has built a vibrant ecosystem with a talent pool and is also attracting intellectual elites from around the globe.
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In this article, we list down some of the leading startups in the country that are working towards AI and ML and doing their best in the industry. The list is in alphabetical order:
1.Ami: Located in the southeast city of Ho Chi Minh, the startup helps real estate businesses with AI-powered solutions. It helps property owners and managers to connect with residents and digitise their information. It uses AI and Blockchain to deliver its products which include Ami A Biz, Ami Citizen, Ami University, Ami Building, Ami Electricity and Ami Fingerprint. Recently, the startup also picked up a prize at the 2017TechFest competition and subsequently received $9 million in funding from the Vietnamese real estate corporation, Binh Minh Group. The company’s target for 2019 is 100,000 rooms across the entire country.
2.CastingAsia: CastingAsia is an AI-driven influencer marketing platform which uses algorithms to ensure that the right brand is connected to the right influencer. Created with an aim to deliver data-driven insights to influencer marketing, this startup has three unique offerings: CastingAsia Platform, CastingAsia Marketplace and CastingAsia Engagement, ensuring that brands and influencers have a smart and safe environment for their influencer marketing activities. The startup is part of AnyMind Group and provides marketers with access to influencers and micro-influencers across Asia using AI. Shingo Hayashi, CastingAsia’s Regional Director, said the company now has 10,000 influencers and the figure is expected to soar to 50,000 by the end of this year, which would help it become the largest influencer marketing platform in Asia.
3.Dropdeck: This is a web platform that helps investors make their decisions efficiently through data-driven investor centric decks. The startup has been founded with an intention to change the way companies are funded worldwide. It uses AI algorithms to rate and rank all participants of a startup. It gained attention In the IBM Watson AI XPRIZE competition, where it earned recognition and support from world-class AI experts. They also then made findings in complementing AI training with blockchain features.
4.Reatlor Profiler: Situated in the capital of Vietnam, Hanoi, Reatlor Profilor is an automated content generation platform which leverages Natural Language Processing to automate the generation of real estate professional bios. It partners with real estate portals, agencies and solutions firm to transform the online profiles of their real estate professionals in no time. It has a AI rapid content generation platform which is capable of transforming a number of LinkedIn, portal and agency profiles in multiple languages..
5.Sentifi: Sentifi uses machine learning and deep learning algorithms as well as natural language processing to find financial market insights. It uses AI in their core product which is developed in Vietnam itself. It uses machine learning and deep learning to analyse over one billion tweets every month in order to extract financial insights. Using ML, it analyses the additional data, classifies the data, rank the sources and link the results to over 50K global companies, commodities and currencies. By making use of the information related to what people tweet, comment or post on social media to help investors make decisions on their portfolio, Sentifi helps in bringing the social dimension to financial analytics.
6.Sero.ai: The startup uses AI works for the agricultural sector and aims to solve the problem of erratic crop production. It connects farmers and agriculture experts through mobile internet. It tracks the plant’s health and detects pest diseases instantly, using pictures.
7.Tinypulse: This startup aims to improve employment retention in companies, with the help of NLP and sentiment analysis. In 2017, it was named one of Puget Sound Business Journals’ Best Places to Work.
8.Trusting Social: Trusting Social aims to give a credit score based on non-traditional input values, for example frequency of which you pay your bill or how much of the bill is paid. The startup leverages ML technologies and applies advanced data science to make sense of complex social data. It uses algorithms for fraud detection to track signals to detect any anomalies in behavior, network and interaction patterns. It also uses ML algorithms to predict financial credibility.
Conclusion
As widely reported, the country struggles from a paucity of AI and ML engineers and needs to build a talent pool. According to Herve Vu Roussel, head of data engineering at Sentifi, Vietnam lacks manpower in the field. The country does not have not enough data, machine learning engineers, data scientists. “AI is still fairly new; there just aren’t a lot of companies here or even in the world. R&D can be very costly.”, he said. But with these improvements in the industry will sure lead the country to make progress in their business.