Vietnam SaaS startups are building software the whole world can use

Vietnam SaaS startups are building the kind of software that runs quietly in the background of other people’s businesses: the point-of-sale screen in a Hanoi clothing shop, the project board a Ho Chi Minh City agency checks each morning, the accounting file a small factory sends to its tax agent. Software as a service, or SaaS, means the customer rents the software over the internet instead of buying it outright and installing it on their own computers. For Vietnam, a country that spent two decades selling software services to foreign clients, SaaS is the next step: instead of building software for someone else, Vietnamese teams now build products of their own and sell them to the world.

From outsourcing workshops to product companies

Vietnam’s software story began with outsourcing. Big firms such as FPT Software, founded in 1999, grew by writing code for clients in Japan, the United States and Europe, and trained tens of thousands of engineers in the process. That work taught Vietnamese developers how global products are built, tested and shipped, but the value stayed with the client who owned the product. SaaS flips that arrangement: the team owns the product, and every new customer adds recurring revenue without a new project to win.

The shift has been gradual. The best-known example is Base.vn, founded in August 2016 as a platform for managing work, people and customers inside a company. In May 2021, FPT acquired Base.vn, a deal that signalled to the whole ecosystem that a Vietnamese SaaS product could be valuable enough for the country’s largest technology group to buy. Base’s founder later started a new SaaS company, True Platform, which raised 3.5 million US dollars in seed funding. That cycle — build, sell, build again — is how a product ecosystem matures.

The home market that teaches the lessons

Most Vietnamese SaaS companies start at home, and the home market is a demanding teacher. Vietnam has hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses, many of them family-run shops, restaurants and workshops. Their owners are practical: software has to be easy to learn, cheap enough to justify and useful on the first day. It has to handle Vietnamese tax rules, Vietnamese payment habits and staff who may never have used business software before.

That pressure shaped the products. KiotViet and Sapo built point-of-sale and shop management tools for retailers who sell on the shop floor, on Facebook and on e-commerce platforms all at once. Haravan built tools for online sellers. MISA, founded in 1994 as an accounting software company, moved its products to the cloud as its customers did. The most popular categories are familiar ones: retail management, collaboration, customer service and human resources. Financial management leads, because every business needs to keep its books straight and the rules keep changing.

Selling at home also taught these companies a hard lesson about price. Vietnamese small businesses are famously careful with money, and many are still reluctant to pay a monthly subscription for software. Providers responded with low prices, free tiers and patient onboarding, including training staff in person. The result is products that are unusually friendly to non-technical users — an advantage when the same product later has to win over a shop owner in Jakarta or Manila.

Selling abroad from a Hanoi or Saigon office

The ambition, though, is bigger than the domestic market. Vietnamese SaaS teams sell abroad in two ways. Some take a product that works in Vietnam and adapt it for nearby markets in Southeast Asia, where small businesses face similar problems: fragmented sales channels, cash-heavy payments and staff who learn on the job. Others build for a global audience from day one, often in niches such as logistics software, marketing tools or developer tools, where the customer never needs to know where the team sits.

Geography helps. Vietnam sits in the same time zones as the region’s biggest markets, and its engineers cost less than those in Singapore or Tokyo while matching them on skill. English is widely used in the technology sector, and a generation of founders has studied or worked abroad. The country’s startup ecosystem, with more than 3,000 active startups by industry estimates, gives SaaS founders access to investors, mentors and early customers who understand the model.

The small businesses going digital on small budgets are the natural first customers for these products, and the relationship runs both ways: the shops teach the software makers what to build, and the software lets the shops compete with chains many times their size.

What still holds the sector back

For all the progress, Vietnam’s SaaS sector is still young. Few companies have reached the scale of their counterparts in the United States or India, and venture funding for software products remains thin compared with the money flowing into e-commerce and financial technology. Many of the best-known companies are not venture-backed startups at all but steady businesses that grew on customer revenue — a respectable path, but a slower one.

Talent is the other constraint. Vietnam produces large numbers of engineers, but product management, user experience design and international sales are newer skills, and the people who have them are in demand everywhere. A SaaS company needs all of those roles, not just programmers. Some teams solve this by hiring abroad or opening small offices in Singapore; others grow the skills in-house, which takes longer.

There is also the question of trust. A business that moves its customer list, its accounts or its staff records into a cloud product is trusting the provider with its most sensitive information. E-invoicing rules and data protection rules have pushed many firms toward properly run software, but providers still have to earn that trust with reliable service, clear data practices and support in Vietnamese.

What this means

Vietnam SaaS startups matter because they change what the country’s technology industry sells. Outsourcing sells hours; SaaS sells a product that can be sold a thousand times without being rebuilt. The products that succeed tend to share a pattern: they solve a concrete problem for a small business, they are simple enough for a non-technical owner to use, and they are cheap enough to try. Base.vn showed that such a product can be worth acquiring. KiotViet, Sapo, Haravan and MISA show that the domestic market alone can sustain serious software companies. The next test is whether the same products can win customers in other countries at scale. If they do, Vietnam will have added a new export — not phones or clothes, but the software that runs other people’s businesses.