On August 8, GenAI Fund announced the key outcomes of the GenAI Open Innovation Viet Nam 2025, held in Ho Chi Minh City in early July. The event facilitated 88 matches between startups and businesses, with 43.8% progressing to discussions on Proof of Concept (PoC) for GenAI solutions, paving the way for promising new avenues to boost GenAI adoption in Viet Nam.
Sponsored by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and supported by Renova Cloud, the programme far exceeded initial expectations, attracting over 400 registrations and nearly 300 in-person attendees.
Laura Nguyen, CEO of GenAI Fund, shared: “Our mission is to harness and maximise the transformative power of GenAI to deliver tangible value for businesses. Viet Nam is entering a breakthrough phase in innovation, and this event clearly demonstrates the strong demand for deeper collaboration in the GenAI sector.”
According to the ASEAN GenAI Startup Report 2024, GenAI startups are driving unprecedented breakthroughs across diverse sectors, including productivity and business solutions, healthcare, financial services, and technology and AI solutions.
GenAI Open Innovation is a quarterly initiative launched in Viet Nam in 2024. After a successful expansion to Singapore in April 2025, the programme returned to Ho Chi Minh City in July 2025 with even stronger engagement from both sides of the ecosystem — businesses and startups.
However, the report also indicates that startups in the GenAI sector are facing significant challenges, such as the slow pace of integration into the enterprise ecosystem, difficulties in effectively implementing PoC projects, the unresolved issue of achieving product/solution–market fit, and competitive pressure from SaaS providers as well as established technology corporations in the market.
During the event, experts shared in-depth perspectives on Viet Nam’s growing readiness to adopt GenAI. Many companies are proactively fostering innovation by allocating dedicated AI budgets, shortening approval times for pilot projects, and offering “sandbox” environments for startups to test solutions with real-world data.
Out of the 88 startup–business matches, 31 GenAI PoC projects have already been initiated, creating direct customer access opportunities for startups while helping companies accelerate innovation more flexibly and effectively.
Building on this success, the GenAI Open Innovation programme will expand into Malaysia, Indonesia, and Japan, aiming to extend its positive impact across the Asia region.
