Vietnamese financial education startup Stag announced on June 27 that it had raised $600,000 in its seed round from local investment house Viet Capital Ventures, NH Securities Vietnam, an affiliate of South Korea’s Nonghyup Financial Group, and the Singapore-based Resolution Ventures.
The funding was made through Viet Capital Ventures’ inaugural Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) program, a 12-18 month accelerator initiative for fintech and wealth-tech companies, the startup said in a statement. This is also understood to be the first startup investment in Vietnam by a Nonghyup affiliate. It is Resolution Ventures’ second investment in the Southeast Asian country, meanwhile, after earned wage access company Gimo.
The funding will help Stag fuel its growth through enhancing financial education features, launching new value-added products for retail and corporate users, enhancing KYC and security features, and completing technology integration with key strategic partners. The investors have committed to providing follow-on funding for Stag, depending on the company’s performance.
According to Mr. Pham Pho Hop, CEO of Viet Capital Asset Management (VCAM), the manager of Viet Capital Ventures, at a time when Vietnamese investors are often overwhelmed or sometimes even misled by market information, Stag takes an education approach to wealth-tech that resonates well with VCAM’s mission: to empower investors with data-driven analyses so they can be regular participants of Vietnam’s growing capital market according to their individual circumstances, investment objectives, and risk profiles.
Stag enables access to fundamental financial knowledge, smart investment planning, and the realization of financial goals. It also offers gamified content based on real-time market data, and develops tools for corporate clients to customize and manage investment programs as part of human resources (HR) services.
Stag was co-founded by Bang Tran, a former Vietnam-based senior manager at the NYSE-listed Chinese fintech platform FinVolution Group, and Vu Nguyen, a former AI lead engineer at Vietnamese unicorn MoMo.