At the 2025 National Innovative Start-up Talent Search Competition, Growlab’s high-quality coconut propagation biotechnology project was awarded the championship title. The victory earned the project the opportunity to represent Viet Nam at the global start-up competition Startup World Cup 2026 in the US.
According to the competition’s organisers, Growlab is among the few entities capable of conducting coconut tissue culture at an industrial scale, offering a timely solution that contributes to revitalising the coconut industry and promoting sustainable growth.
At the core of the solution is the Multipuno™ biotechnology platform, which enables industrial-scale coconut propagation through tissue culture, producing uniform, disease-free seedlings with stable growth that can be supplied in large quantities.
This approach has been pursued for decades by many countries and research institutes worldwide, yet very few have succeeded in developing a commercially viable solution, even as billions of coconut trees globally have become old and low-yielding, resulting in a serious shortage of quality planting material.
What truly sets the solution apart, however, lies in its mother plant selection process. Associate Professor Dr Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao, co-founder and senior adviser of Growlab, explained that the company applies a two-tier selection strategy.
First, elite mother plants are rigorously selected based on phenotype and fruit quality indicators such as yield, size, endosperm structure, oil content and other key economic traits.
At the same time, molecular biology techniques are employed to identify genetic markers associated with yield and quality, providing a more scientific and highly accurate basis for selection.
Building on this foundation, the Multipuno™ platform enables the rapid and synchronised multiplication of elite individuals, ensuring a stable supply of high-quality seedlings, reducing variability in cultivation and opening up sustainable growth prospects across the entire agricultural value chain.
To date, Growlab has applied its propagation technology to several high-value coconut varieties, notably Tra Vinh wax coconut and traditional local coconuts. For many years, the development of wax coconut has faced significant challenges due to traditional cultivation methods that rely heavily on natural conditions, resulting in a very low and unstable proportion of wax coconuts and wide disparities in quality among trees within the same plantation.
As a result, standardised planting material has remained scarce, making it difficult to scale up production in line with market potential. In practical deployment, Growlab’s tissue-cultured seedlings have achieved a high-quality wax coconut rate of 80–100 per cent, with yields exceeding 100 fruits per tree per year after four years of cultivation.
Sharing the company’s future development strategy, Associate Professor Dr Nguyen Thi Phuong Thao said Growlab would continue to expand coconut seedling production while further developing Multipuno™ as a propagation technology platform applicable to a wide range of perennial and other high-value crops.
The platform not only has the potential to raise coconut productivity in Viet Nam, but also offers solutions to the challenge of sustainable planting material in tropical agricultural regions worldwide. This is a core factor enabling the technology to gain traction and make its mark in the global start-up landscape, where start-ups are assessed not only on ideas but also on their capacity to deliver long-term impact and tangible value for society.
The company will also focus on completing an internationally standardised research and development system, closely linking scientific research with market demand and specific raw material zones. Participation in Startup World Cup 2026 presents valuable opportunities for learning and networking as part of the company’s long-term growth strategy.
