GA, Dragoneer lead $250m Series B for Vietnam's VNLife
General Atlantic and Dragoneer Investment Group have led a $250 million Series B round for Vietnamese financial technology provider VNLife.
PayPal Ventures and Singapore’s EDBI also joined the round, as did existing investors GIC and SoftBank Vision Fund 1. GIC and SoftBank provided about $300 million in 2019.
VNLife is best known for its subsidiary VNPay, which helps the company digitize operations for more than 40 domestic banks. It claims to provide the country’s largest interoperable cashless payment network, with 22 million users and more than 150,000 merchants.
Further operations include VNTravel Tourism, a local travel agency that company claims is a market leader that connects with consumers via several brands. There is also a “new retail” division called Teko Vietnam Technology, which provides a suite of software products for small to large enterprises.
“Vietnam is a rapidly-expanding economy undergoing a significant digital transformation across banking, payments and commerce, and we expect that it will continue to benefit from these sustainable growth tailwinds,” Sandeep Naik, a managing director and head of India and Southeast Asia at General Atlantic, said in a statement.
“VNLife has demonstrated its ability to be a market leader in each of these verticals and is playing an important role in driving digitization and building mission-critical digital infrastructure to support Vietnam’s long-term economic growth.”
Tech-enabled banking is an emerging sector in Vietnam and subject to strict foreign investment ceiling of 30%. Still, the ecosystem is punctuated by a smattering of well-funded support service players, with recent activity including a $100 million Series D for mobile wallet MoMo led by Goodwater Capital and Warburg Pincus.
GIC joined Mizuho Bank in an approximately $265 million investment in Vietcombank in 2019, taking 2.5% and 15% stakes, respectively. Warburg Pincus-backed Techcombank raised $922 million in a Vietnam IPO in 2018.
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