29-year-old Nguyen Van Minh Duc has gone against the odds to make a 10-year ambitious journey to build the Da Nang-based Hekate Technology Joint Stock Company, one of Viet Nam’s pioneering companies in artificial intelligence (AI) and digital transformation

Duc (middle) sharing his startup experience with young people in Da Nang

Co-founded in 2016 by Duc and his peers, Hekate made the debut of its first product, chatbot SUMI, which mainly serves the entertainment needs of the young. This IT product, in less than 6 months, attracted huge messages volumes of 1.3 - 1.4 million per day.

Following SUMI's impressive successful strides, Hekate embarked upon tapping the benefits of AI technology with a focus on three main segments, namely natural language processing, computer vision and machine learning.

With the goal of bringing the benefits of AI to everyone, Hekate is currently supporting more than 1,000 businesses across the country to apply AI into business operations and customer care automation.

In particular, Hekate also proudly serves as a technology partner to municipal/ provincial governments integrate AI into tourism, public services, and taxation for smart city building schemes.

This business is the developer of the Danang FantastiCity chatbot, and another serving the 27^th APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting in Da Nang to promote the city’s image through this important  international-level event.

Duc said, before the opening of the Hekate, he and his friends had surprised the IT community at that time with the debut of many highly-useful educational apps. Most outstanding amongst them were VINAHIS website, which facilitated the learning and teaching of the History subject.

Keeping the momentum going forward, Duc’s group continued building up a specialised social network named ThinkS for educational purposes attracting as many as 11,000 users who are students from the Da Nang University of Education.

Revealing how he start his own business, Duc said, the initial chance to attend a conference of Microsoft developers enticed him and his friends to make a deeper insight into chatbot, which is a new type of application combining AI- one of the trends in modern technology, which helps to shape the world in a smarter way.

Duc’s group, therefore, started managing to do research into the chatbot technology. After 6 months of incubation at the Da Nang Business Incubator (DNES), they have established their own company.

In March, 2017, Hekate was selected for Facebook’s startup accelerator programme, and it was sponsored 80,000$ to develop its business. Besides, the group’s products received Angel Investment for start-up businesses and a fund of 120,000 $ from Microsoft to support the development of data infrastructure.

Till date, the company has commercialised its products by partnering with such online retailers as Amazon, Alibaba, Lazada and Zalora.

With his strong ambition, Duc plans to bring his company’s startup ideas into fruition in the coming time despite whatever challenges he may face.

By KHANG NINH- Translated by A.T