Vietnamese investment app Infina raises $2m in oversubscribed round

Infina, a Vietnamese investment app that seeks to become the “Robinhood of Vietnam”, announced that it has raised $2 million in an oversubscribed seed funding round.

The found was backed by Saison Capital, Venturra Discovery, 1982 Ventures, 500 Startups, Nextrans, executives at Google and Netflix, and other angel investors.

Launched in January this year, Infina features an easy-to-use user interface and in-app educational content.

It currently serves tens of thousands of users with financial partners to include some of the country’s largest fund managers such as Dragon Capital Vietnam, ACB Capital, Mirae Asset Fund Management, and Viet Capital Asset Management.

Infina said it will use the fresh funding to fuel its growth and expand product offerings. Infina is built with regional aspirations, however, for the immediate term, it continues focusing on Vietnam as there are plenty of growth opportunities.

Infina was founded by James Vuong, an egineer-turned-VC-turnd-startup-founder with a track record in Silicon Valley and Vietnam.

In 2008, he returned to Vietnam as VP of Investment and a Kauffman Fellow at IDG Ventures. Later on, Vuong launched Infina after his prior company was acquired by the Japanese giant LINE Corporation.

Infina assembles a leadership team with experience in the US, Singapore, and Japan capital markets; and is backed by a sophisticated board of advisors from Vietnam’s leading financial institutions such as Hanoi Saigon Corporation (HSC), ACB Securities, among others.

The startup seeks to tap into a growing opportunity in retail investing space in Vietnam. The country of 97 million population has more than 75% internet users transacting money digitally, but roughly 3.14 million invest in stocks or 3.2% of its population.

While capital investing penetration remains relatively low, it is 3x higher than Vietnam’s neighbor Indonesia with roughly 1% penetration. And the number is growing especially among millennials.

According to the Vietnam Securities Depository, approximately 500,000 trading accounts opened in the first 5 months of 2021, a 20% record jump from the full year 2020 number.