Two Topica Founder Institute graduates aced the Go Live! Vietnam Venture Cup and won a total of $30,000 at the competition held in Ho Chi Minh City on December 22, 2015.
Hoayeuthuong.com, a five-year-old flower delivery platform won $15,000 for the “growth startup category”; and Mimosatek, a startup that develops agricultural technologies, won $15,000 for “new startup category”.
About Hoayeuthuong.com
Founded by Pham Hoang Thai Duong, Hoayeuthuong.com is committed to delivering quality, fresh flowers every day. But their aspirations don’t stop there. The flower delivery website is setting their sights on a billion dollar market and wanting to build a Vietnamese floral bionetwork that will connect shops as well as ordinary consumers to farmers, both online and off.
Doing e-commerce is hard, navigating into manufacturing is even harder. But our ambition is to develop a flower business ecosystem in Vietnam.” - Pham Hoang Thai Duong
About Mimosatek
Younger startup Mimosatek was founded in November 2014, and seeks to change the lives of farmers by providing apps as well as hardware that will maximize productivity while minimizing crop and cost risks. With goals as lofty as their TFI graduate comrades, Mimosatek can accurately measure the needs of plants, animals, and other ambient conditions, which is the foundation of their “mission to help the farmers develop sustainable production.”
With this smart technology, farmers can obtain soil conditions in real time and calculate the time and amount of water needed for each crop. In addition to a multitude of intelligent features, Mimosatek’s product also warns of adverse environmental conditions such as flood or drought, tracks daily plant statuses, and provides a thorough plant database.
Graduates from the Topica Founder Institute in Vietnam
While both winners were startup graduates from the Topica Founder Institute in Vietnam, they weren’t the only ones from the program that were recognized at the Samsung Vietnam Venture Cup last year. The first runner up to Mimosatek in the “new startup category” was FreelancerViet, a fellow startup from TFI.
About the Founder Institute program
The Founder Institute (FI) is a startup launch program that educates talented technology entrepreneurs by offering a well-structured step-by-step program that provides mentor support and a global network. Entrepreneurs learn to build their employee team and procure customers, raise funds, and test their startup ideas.
Not just another business training center, The Founder Institute employs rigorous training via challenging business-building assignments on a weekly basis. And graduating from FI isn’t exactly easy; less than 40 percent of those accepted make it through the entire program (but are always invited back when they are ready).
Using a predictive admissions test, FI can predict with 85 percent accuracy whether or not someone will become a successful tech entrepreneur. This revolutionary approach has been featured in The New York Times, CNN, and Forbes. And like their graduates, FI has an admirable goal to: Globalize Silicon Valley.
The Founder Institute believes that Silicon Valley is a concerted ecosystem, where the global community can share ideas, best practices, important feedback and informative metrics; which lead to a more rapid iteration, effectual innovation, and quicker market growth. TFI accomplishes all of this by fostering a shared liquidity pool within collaborative global culture where all involved share the equity of companies formed during each semester.
FI isn’t the only one recognizing Vietnam startup success
In Your cheat sheet on Vietnam's startup scene, journalist Kevin McSpadden aptly crafted the subtitle to read: “Vietnam may be Southeast Asia’s most intriguing young hub. Here’s what - and who - you need to know”, clearly indicating the upward trend of Vietnam’s overall economy and impressive talent.
Other Vietnamese news reports state that any conversation about startups in Vietnam always involve TFI because “over the last three years, TFI has graduated more than 34 founders, with a total funding of more than US$10 million and a combined valuation of US$60 million for the top eight startups”.
