Four Years Without a New Unicorn: The Quiet Collapse of Vietnam's Tech Elite

[Four Years Without a New Unicorn: The Quiet Collapse of Vietnam's Tech Elite]

▍ Tiki's Crash: From $1 Billion to Under $10 Million

The clearest picture of where Vietnam's unicorn story stands right now is a May 2025 DealStreetAsia report. The headline reads: "Tiki's plunge from soonicorn to sub-$10m valuation."

Tiki is a Vietnamese e-commerce veteran. The company started in 2010 when Tran Ngoc Thai Son sold English books out of a small room in Ho Chi Minh City. It was often called Vietnam's answer to Amazon. In 2021, a late-stage round pushed its valuation close to $1 billion, and in May 2022 Tiki became Vietnam's fourth unicorn. At the time, it looked like Vietnamese e-commerce was about to step onto the Southeast Asian stage.

Four years later, the company is worth less than $10 million, a drop of over 99%.

In Q1 2025, Tiki's GMV was down nearly 60% year-on-year, while Vietnam's overall e-commerce market grew by more than 40% in the same period. The market didn't shrink. Tiki just got pushed out of it. When Vietnamese consumers open their phones, about 67% of their e-commerce activity goes to Shopee, nearly 30% to TikTok Shop, and less than 1% to Tiki. By Q1 2025, Tiki was too small to show up on market share charts at all.

VNG had been a long-time significant shareholder of Tiki. In 2025 it wrote down the entire stake on its books and formally ended its corporate relationship with Tiki. There was no acquirer, no merger proposal. Tiki simply disappeared from the market.

▍ The Government Report Lists Only Two Unicorns

If you only look at Tiki, it might seem like a one-off. But Vietnam's Ministry of Science and Technology put a harder number on the table in its December 2025 "Vietnam Innovative Startup Ecosystem Report," released at Techfest 2025: Vietnam currently has "two existing unicorns and several near-unicorn enterprises."

Private trackers usually list five: VNG, VNPay, MoMo, Sky Mavis, and Tiki. The government counts two. It hasn't published names.

Work backwards from each company's current state and the picture gets clearer. Tiki has crashed, worth less than $10 million. Sky Mavis is headquartered in Singapore, with Vietnam only as an operating hub. MoMo hasn't had a publicly validated valuation round in three years. The two that can plausibly still be counted are VNG and VNPay.

The same report also set a 2030 target: add three to four more strategic tech unicorns, focused on AI, semiconductors, and green tech. It sounds like an expansion goal. Read it in reverse and it becomes a snapshot of the present. Vietnam's last widely recognized new unicorn was MoMo in December 2021. By the end of 2025, that is four full years without a new one.

▍ What the Remaining Four Have in Common

Set the remaining four (excluding Tiki) side by side. The details look different. Put them together and the pattern is obvious.

VNG's revenue grew 17% in 2025, but the company posted its fifth consecutive year of losses. In January 2024 it withdrew its Nasdaq IPO filing and listed on Vietnam's UPCoM market, where the company itself admits trading is irregular and liquidity is thin. The first piece in this series covered Zalo's product dilemma: a 98% open rate but only third place in time spent. VNG's next answers are paid subscriptions and AI cloud services, and neither has paid off yet.

VNPay has been quieter. Parent company VNLife became Vietnam's second unicorn in 2020, raising a total of $550 million from investors including GIC, SoftBank, and General Atlantic. After the Series B in 2021, VNPay hasn't announced a new valuation round. In 2025, reports suggested GIC and SoftBank were considering selling down their stakes in VNLife. The two 2021 investors want out, but there's no buyer to take over.

MoMo is the one with the most visible trajectory. It became a unicorn in December 2021 with a $200 million E-round led by Mizuho, and has been profitable since 2024, which is rare among Vietnamese unicorns. In April 2026 MoMo retained Jefferies and Morgan Stanley to run a new fundraising round targeting a valuation above $2 billion.

But according to Reuters, sources say a near-term IPO is not on the table. In other words, MoMo is choosing to raise another private round and push the valuation up, rather than list now.

Sky Mavis's fall has been the most dramatic. It became a unicorn in October 2021 at a $3 billion valuation, with a16z, Accel, and Binance Labs on the cap table. Over the next three years, both of its main tokens, AXS and SLP, dropped more than 90% from their 2021 peaks, and the Axie Infinity NFT floor price fell from hundreds of dollars to under $1. In November 2024 Sky Mavis laid off 21% of staff. In June 2026 it will close its flagship game, Axie Infinity Classic.

The four situations differ but the common ground is clear. Valuations are all frozen at 2021 levels, with no new round to reset the ceiling. None of them has broken out of Vietnam; every overseas move has either failed to take off or been walked back. None has a working path to an IPO; listings have been delayed, withdrawn, or put off indefinitely. And with the exception of MoMo's recent profitability, the other three are still burning cash.

▍ The Wider Freeze

This is not a problem with a few companies. The entire ecosystem is cooling down in sync.

Vietnamese VC investment has declined for five straight years since its 2021 peak. In 2024, combined VC and PE volumes fell by a third from the previous year. In 2025, private VC reached just $215 million, with 60% of it going to follow-ons and bridge rounds for existing portfolio companies. New deals are getting almost nothing.

That's only half the problem. The other half is that money can't get out either. Vietnam doesn't have an equity market exit for tech unicorns. The companies on the VN-Index are mostly banks, property, and manufacturing. UPCoM, Vietnam's secondary market for unlisted public companies, is so thin that VNG itself complains about liquidity. The only overseas option left has been Nasdaq, and VNG filed there in August 2023 before withdrawing in January 2024.

By the time VNG pulled its filing, the market already had a very visible warning. In August 2023, another Vietnamese company, EV maker VinFast, went public on Nasdaq via a SPAC. The stock jumped nearly 300% on its first day, and at its peak the company was briefly worth more than Ford and General Motors combined. Within a year, VinFast had lost 97% of that value.

The most recent high-profile Vietnamese listing on Nasdaq had just demonstrated how the market would reprice a Vietnamese story. VNG's own F-1 disclosure made things harder: Tencent, GIC, and Ant Group together held around 60% of the shares. Chinese and Singaporean state-linked capital dominated the outside register at exactly the moment US-China tech scrutiny was sharpening.

VC winter plus no IPO exit means the money can't come in and it can't get out. Existing investors can't find buyers, new investors can't see a path to an exit, and valuations stay frozen at 2021 water levels.

▍ Meanwhile, What the Rest of Southeast Asia Was Doing

To understand what's really going on with Vietnam's unicorns, you have to zoom out regionally. In the same window, Southeast Asia's other tech majors have been completing a very different cycle.

Sea Group (Shopee, Garena, and the Monee fintech arm) posted $22.9 billion in 2025 revenue and $1.6 billion in net income, 3.6 times the previous year. 2025 was also Shopee's first full year in the black since listing. The Monee segment alone is more than ten times the size of VNG as a whole.

Grab posted $3.37 billion in 2025 revenue and turned profitable for the first time on a full-year basis since listing. In November 2025, the Indonesian government reversed its earlier opposition and began backing a possible Grab–GoTo merger, which would be one of the largest recent tech deals in Southeast Asia.

Put those numbers next to VNG's. Sea's revenue is 52 times VNG's. Grab's is 8 times.

The more important gap isn't scale, it's the stage of the business cycle. Sea is now on its second straight year of full-year profit. Grab has just finished its first. Both have completed the brutal transition from "burn cash to grow" to "grow and make money." Vietnamese unicorns are still stuck in the burn phase, and Sky Mavis has gone as far as layoffs and killing a flagship game to stop the bleeding.

The position Vietnamese unicorns hold in Southeast Asia has shifted from would-be challengers rewriting the regional map to local survivors defending a domestic market.

▍ What the 2030 Target Really Says

Come back to the Vietnamese government's "three to four more strategic tech unicorns by 2030."

On the surface it's an expansion plan. Read the other way, it's an admission of the present: only two left, none added in four years. The initial $20 million for the new national venture fund isn't even a rounding error against Vietnam's own annual private VC total.

The problem won't be solved by changes to the official unicorn list. Tiki, Sky Mavis, VNPay, VNG, and MoMo each ended up where they are for different reasons. Put together, they point at the same ecosystem issue: products that haven't run a full profit cycle, a market with no listing exit, and no business model that has been successfully exported beyond Vietnam.

Whether Vietnam hits the 2030 target depends less on whether the next round can print a new billion-dollar price tag, and more on whether this ecosystem can produce one company that walks all the way from burning cash to making real money.

"Vietnamese unicorn" as a label is going to keep shrinking in 2026, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. It looks more like the market finally acknowledging something simple: unicorn status was only the ticket in. The real test is just starting.

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