Participated · Series C · Sep 2023

ELSA, founded in 2016, offers speaking lessons with personalized learning plans, test and interview preparation, and a speech analyzer to help users improve conversational skills. The company recently launched ELSA AI Tutor, a voice-based generative-AI tutor that role-plays conversations and uses speech recognition to give feedback on pronunciation, grammar, cadence and professional tone. The AI Tutor remembers users’ past performance to customize lessons and is aimed at learners who lack access to live tutors. ELSA has offices in San Francisco, Lisbon and Ho Chi Minh City. The company said it will use the new funding to support and grow its platform, expand further in Taiwan, enter the Middle East and Turkey, build on success in Japan, and increase its focus on B2B. To date ELSA has raised $60 million. ELSA is a pronunciation-focused English learning app that uses proprietary speech-recognition AI trained on accented English from millions of users to provide detailed feedback on sounds, intonation, rhythm and fluency. The app offers fine-grained correction of individual sounds and advanced prosodic coaching to help learners speak more naturally. ELSA claims more than 13 million users and was founded in 2015; it is based in San Francisco and Ho Chi Minh City. The company has partnerships with IDP (which now recommends ELSA for IELTS test preparation), language schools in Vietnam (IMAP and Speak Up), online platform YOLA, and corporate clients including Kimberly Clark, Intel and ATAD. Going forward, ELSA plans to expand operations in Latin America, Vietnam, India and Japan and to build a scalable B2B platform to offer its coaching services to companies and educational organizations. Elsa provides an AI and voice-recognition app that grades users' English speaking and pronunciation against standard American English and gives detailed feedback. The service is freemium, offering full access to 1,000 courses for roughly $3–6 per month, with new content added weekly. Elsa reports users in more than 100 countries and two million paying users in its top market, Vietnam. The company supports localized payments and a local sales team in Vietnam and has opened an office in Tokyo as part of expansion into Japan, Indonesia and India. Elsa is preparing to support additional languages (Spanish announced as next) by building voice-recognition models and collecting voice data to train them. It is also pursuing the education market by licensing the app to schools (subsidized per‑student fees) and allowing teachers to upload curriculum and track students' oral homework. ELSA provides an AI- and speech-recognition-powered app that gives personalized pronunciation feedback and coaching to English learners. Users take a five-minute assessment that builds a tailored curriculum from roughly 600 lessons and 3,000+ words; lessons are bite-sized (about two minutes) and include five progressively harder exercises. The app listens to learners, compares speech to American English targets, highlights performance (red/yellow/green) and offers corrective tips on mouth and tongue placement. Since launch the product has been adopted by a few million users in over 100 countries (about half in Southeast Asia) who practice a few million exercises per week. ELSA generates revenue via subscriptions (about $3.99/month or $29.99/year, with a quarterly option and regional price variance). Future plans include building a teacher tool to import classroom curriculum, adding new languages, developing a voice-recognition API, and hiring additional AI talent.

Led · Series B · Jun 2022

Finhay is a Vietnamese fintech startup operating a micro-investment platform for Millennials, recommending savings, investment and insurance products based on customers' personal information and risk assessments. Customers can begin investing with as little as $3, and the platform has more than 2.7 million registered users. Founded in 2017 by Huy Nghiem, Finhay recently acquired a securities brokerage, making it the only licensed digital investment platform in Vietnam. The company says it will use new funding to support business expansion, talent acquisition and technology development. Nghiem envisions Finhay as a one-stop solution where customers can manage their wealth seamlessly. Vietnam's growing economy and rising interest in first-time investing underpin the company's market opportunity. Finhay is a Vietnam-based robo-advisor platform that enables consumers to build investment portfolios with minimums of around $2. Founded in 2017, it has worked with around 20 investment funds and served over 100,000 customers. The company uses a micro-investing model to let consumers allocate small amounts into diversified portfolios. With its latest capital injection, Finhay plans to expand its market reach, improve its infrastructure and hire more staff. The article does not disclose the size or instrument of the new investment. Previous funding includes $1.5M from backers such as H2 Ventures and Insignia Venture Partners.

Led · Equity · Jan 2022

VTC Academy operates a digital academic ecosystem providing professional training in tech, design, and digital marketing. Over three years it opened three branches in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City with support from Vietnam Investment Group (VIG) and built modern learning facilities and an international partner network. The academy emphasizes a high-quality professional team that contributes to program development and R&D. VTC Academy reports revenue and enrollment growth of up to 200% year-over-year over the past three years. It secured $3 million in funding from VIG and is pursuing up to $20 million for a five-year development plan to support long-term growth. Leadership cites rising demand for technology-based human resources as a key driver of expansion.

Participated · Seed · Nov 2020

Nektar.ai builds a sales productivity platform that integrates with email, calendars, web conferences, Slack, CRM tools, LinkedIn and WhatsApp to reduce manual data entry and surface key deal data. The product includes a web console for managers, a Chrome extension, integrations with Salesforce, Google Workspace and Slack, and an AI-based Capture Bot that extracts important information from online interactions. It provides analytics such as multithreading scores to help reps and managers understand how deals progress and where wins or losses occur. The company has been in stealth since its 2020 founding, working with hundreds of clients in private beta and onboarding more than 200 prospects from its waitlist. Nektar.ai plans a public launch in the first half of 2022 and will use part of its seed funding to build a go-to-market team focused on the United States. The workforce is remote-first and the company reports that half of its team are women. Nektar.ai is a Singapore-based sales productivity platform founded earlier this year by CEO Abhijeet Vijayvergiya and CTO Aravind Ravi Sulekha. The product integrates workplace tools such as Slack, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Exchange and WhatsApp with CRM platforms including Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and HubSpot. It offers features like collaborative "playbooks" (best practices, goals and alerts) and positions itself as an AI layer on top of sales data to be quicker and easier to use than CRM customization. The company says the platform reduces time spent on administrative tasks and feeds data into analytics and automated to-do lists. Nektar worked in stealth with five companies and currently has a waitlist of about 20 potential early users, primarily late-stage SaaS companies. The team plans an early adopter release and a public launch by the end of 2021.