Vietnam builds its backbone with ports, power and state banks. Startups get less than 1%.

This issue is a Vietnam special: the last 24 months of capital, policy and projects in Vietnam’s built world. We built a separate dataset for it (33 deals, 34 signals) and a short map of the startups worth knowing. Everything is on the new Vietnam page of the Startup Map, and every number below links to its source. The regional weekly roundup returns next issue.

The short version

• 33 deals and $11.9B of disclosed capital in Vietnam’s built world between October 2024 and October 2026, plus 34 policy and project signals.
• Startups took 0.6%. Nine venture rounds added up to $71M disclosed. For comparison, Issue #1 counted $433M of built-world venture across Southeast Asia and India in just seven weeks.
• Two ports took more than half (55.5%). Can Gio ($4.9B, with MSC’s terminal arm) and Lien Chieu ($1.7B, with APM Terminals) dwarf everything else.
• Domestic banks wrote 78% of the debt. Vietcombank-led syndicates financed an LNG power plant and Vietnam’s largest-ever road concession loan. Development banks mostly lend through local banks.
• Energy had the most deals (15 of 33), and they followed the rules: a new Electricity Law, direct power purchase agreements, and a revised power plan in 2025.
• Construction tech, smart buildings and urban data are almost empty at the startup level, just as a new smart-city decree starts requiring digital twins and BIM handover.

The numbers

Capital by sector: Mobility & Logistics $6.65B (4 deals) · Energy & Utilities $2.79B (15) · Infrastructure & Smart City $2.14B (5) · Climate & Water $211M (5) · PropTech $148M (4) · ConTech and Smart Buildings: none found.

Five things we noticed

1. Startups get less than a cent of every dollar

Nine venture rounds, $71M disclosed, against $11.9B in total. The rounds that did happen cluster in energy and electric two-wheelers:

• E-mobility: Dat Bike raised a $22M Series B co-led by Japan’s F.C.C. and Rebright Partners, then $4M more from Thien Viet Securities.
• Rooftop solar finance: Stride ($15M Series B, Lightrock) and SmartSolar ($1.85M seed).
• Charging and storage: Grab took a stake in charging network EBOOST; ADB Ventures backed thermal-battery maker Alternō.
• Property: co-living operator M Village raised $26M from Mizuho Asia Partners and Trip.com, the largest round in the set. Valuation platform Citics raised $2.1M to digitise mortgage lending.

The wider market tells the same story. Vietnam’s VC rose 28% to $509M in 2025, per Do Ventures and BCG, but climate, logistics and real-estate-and-infrastructure together made up only about 9% of it.

2. The big money goes into gateways: ports and data centres

• Ports: Ho Chi Minh City approved MSC’s terminal arm, VIMC and Saigon Port to build the $4.9B Can Gio transshipment hub. Da Nang picked Hateco and APM Terminals for the $1.7B Lien Chieu container port.
• Data centres: two hyperscale campuses got investment certificates at Saigon Hi-Tech Park: Evolution’s 52 MW ($509M) and Sembcorp’s 60 MW ($480M). Another ~$5B sits in MoUs, including KBC–AIC–VietinBank and G42–FPT.
• The catch: STT GDC walked away from its HCMC site and VNG bought it back. Land tenure and power supply decide which MoUs become buildings.

3. Domestic banks write the big cheques; development banks work through them

• State-bank syndicates: Vietcombank led a $1.12B loan for the Quang Trach II LNG plant and a $1.03B loan to widen the HCMC–My Thuan expressway, described as the largest ever for a Vietnamese road concession. Domestic banks wrote 78% of the debt we tracked.
• Development finance goes through local banks and bonds: the EIB’s €200M facility with Techcombank, FMO and BII in HDBank’s green bonds, and GuarantCo guaranteeing Verdant’s rooftop-solar green bond.
• Development equity is reaching the circular economy: Norfund put $4M into a PET recycling plant in southern Vietnam.
• Direct sovereign lending goes to resilience: €230M from European lenders for Vietnam’s first pumped-storage plant (same EEAS source) and an ADB package for climate-proof irrigation.

4. The power rules changed, and private energy deals followed

In 18 months Vietnam rewrote its power market:

• a new Electricity Law opening grids to private investors;
• Decree 57 making direct power purchase agreements workable;
• a revised power plan targeting 46–73 GW of solar and 10–16 GW of storage by 2030;
• Decree 243 adding data centres and EV-charging sites as direct buyers and lifting rooftop solar exports to 50%.

The deals followed:

• a $296M solar-plus-storage plant selling straight to a manufacturer;
• a privately owned 1,200 MW LNG plant in HCMC;
• operating-asset buyers such as Actis’s Levanta and Tokyo Gas in wind;
• a cluster of commercial rooftop financiers, including CME Solar.

5. Two-wheelers are going electric, but slower than the headlines

• The order: Directive 20 set a ban on petrol motorbikes inside Hanoi’s Ring Road 1 from July 2026.
• What started: a weekend-evening low-emission pilot in the Old Quarter.
• What drives adoption: EVs keep their zero registration fee to 2030, and VinFast sold a record 115,916 EVs in Vietnam in H1 2026.
• Independent charging stays small: in March 2026 EV One had 111 charging posts and EverCharge 33 stations. EverSolar has turned its stations into V-Green franchises that serve only VinFast cars.
• How startups scale: through bigger partners. Selex put battery-swap cabinets into Petrolimex stations, and EBOOST is built into the Grab driver app.

Who to know: Vietnam’s built-world startups

A short map, not a ranking. We list only companies with a product live and a verifiable signal in 2025–26.

What’s missing is as telling as what’s there. We found no venture-backed construction-tech or urban-data startup with a verifiable 2025–26 signal. Climate and water have early names, but they run on grants and challenge prizes: RetriV is a spin-out of a seafood by-products company, and AirX Carbon has not disclosed an equity round. Construction tech in Vietnam is largely BIM outsourcing for foreign clients. Smart-city and urban-data work appears to go to telcos and IT conglomerates, and Vingroup’s V-Green out-builds every startup in charging and battery swapping.

Signals to watch

• A rulebook for smart cities: Decree 269 requires provincial operations centres, open urban data platforms, digital twins and as-built BIM handover. Meanwhile, the 63-to-34 province merger resets every master plan those systems will sit on.
• Rail, slowly:
  • The $67B North–South high-speed line now starts in December 2027.
  • The Lao Cai–Hai Phong link to China has broken ground.
  • VinSpeed started a $5.6B Hanoi–Quang Ninh line.
• Nuclear is back: Vietnam signed with Rosatom for Ninh Thuan 1. Japan has left Ninh Thuan 2.
• A finance hub with tax breaks: the international financial centre in HCMC and Da Nang offers 10% corporate tax for 30 years.
• Capital keeps arriving: registered FDI hit $50.4B in the first nine months of 2026, up 76%. Transport and storage drew $5.1B of it.

Radar movement

None this issue. The Vietnam look-back lives in its own dataset (deals, signals) rather than the weekly database. The radar’s momentum score compares the last four weeks with everything before them, so adding 24 months of one country’s history would make almost every item look like it was speeding up. The radar and its method are unchanged, and the weekly tracker resumes next issue.

What this means for teams scouting the region

→ Treat Vietnam as a deployment market, not a startup market. The money is in ports, power, roads and data centres, financed by state banks and development lenders. The way in is to sell into those projects through their developers, EPC contractors and operators, rather than to wait for local startups to scale.

→ Follow the rulebook to find buyers.

• Decree 269 turns digital twins, urban data platforms and BIM handover into legal requirements for cities.
• Decree 243 makes data centres and charging sites direct buyers of clean power.
• Both create budgets before they create local suppliers.

→ Enter through platforms. Grab and EBOOST, Petrolimex and Selex, F.C.C. and Dat Bike: in Vietnam, strategic partners are the main source of both capital and distribution.

→ The gaps are the opening. Construction tech, smart-building software and urban data have almost no local challengers. A foreign scale-up with a credible Vietnamese delivery partner faces little competition, and plenty of new rules that need complying with.

Method. Scope: Vietnam only; built-world technology and capital (PropTech, construction tech, smart buildings, infrastructure and smart city, energy and utilities, urban mobility and logistics, climate and water) between 12 October 2024 and 11 October 2026.

How the numbers are counted:

• Sources: every deal and signal comes from a public announcement or media report, linked on the Vietnam page of the Startup Map.
• Amounts: disclosed amounts only, in USD. VND is converted at 25,400 (2024–25) and 26,300 (2026), and EUR at 1.16. Headline project values (ports, LNG, data centres) are total investment, not money already spent.
• What counts as a deal: signed financing, licensed investment, financial close or an agreed acquisition. MoUs and framework agreements are listed as signals. Vingroup group projects (VinSpeed rail, V-Green charging) are tracked as signals because their disclosures mix corporate and project money.

What this data cannot tell us:

• Coverage is uneven. Coverage of late 2024 is thinner than of 2025–26, so don’t read the jump between the two years as a trend on its own.
• The venture list is probably incomplete for logistics: Do Ventures counts $9.5M of logistics VC in 2025 that we could not attribute to named rounds.
• Headline VC totals differ by source and method. For 2025, Do Ventures and BCG report $509M, while another industry outlook puts it nearer $215M.