Three Vietnamese Startups Worth Watching In August 2026

Three startups launched in Vietnam in the first half of 2026: a fintech company building a smart payment ring, a recruitment platform doing away with resumes, and a student-founded venture turning river weeds into packaging. Here is a quick look at each.

Many Touches

Launching August 2026 | Fintech and deep tech

Most of us carry a wallet full of cards, keys, badges, and passes. Each one has a different purpose, but they all do the same thing: give you access, whether to your money, your home, your office, or a loyalty program.

Many Touches, founded by CEO Paul Emile Destouches, wants to replace them all with one object. Its first product is The Ring, a smart ring that lets you pay, unlock buildings, access offices, use transportation, identify yourself, and collect loyalty points with a simple gesture of your hand.

Behind that simplicity is years of work in fintech and deep tech. The company partners with banks to turn a traditional payment credential into an everyday credential that securely connects people to the services they use. But its guiding idea is that users should never have to think about the technology at all. It should disappear and simply work.

The Ring is the first step in a bigger vision: a future where convenience is invisible, and interacting with the physical world takes nothing more than a wave of the hand. “You put it on in the morning and forget it's there, but it does everything for you,” Destouches said after the company won at the 2025 Top Vietnam Industry 4.0 Awards. “That is what smart tech should feel like.”

Talential

Launched July 2026 | Recruitment

Talential is a recruitment platform with no middleman, no resume, and no AI evaluating talent.

That last part is deliberate. While much of the hiring industry moves toward algorithmic screening, Talential is betting on the opposite: bringing back the human signal in HR. The platform captures what managers actually think about the people they work with, their strengths and honest feedback, and builds data from that to help people find the right career path.

Inside the company, though, AI is everywhere. Talential has built what it calls a development factory, where features are broken into small, well-defined pieces that any trained team member can build with AI assistance. The team is mostly testers and product managers, with almost no traditional developers. Everyone is trained to use AI, and everything is data driven.

The company sums up its identity in one line: it doesn't sell AI, it sells a great product built with AI.

GreenShield Mekong

Launched March 2026 | Green packaging

GreenShield Mekong was founded by five students from FPT University in Can Tho: Le Hoang Khanh, who leads the team, along with Tran Minh Khanh, Khuu Thuy Quynh, Nguyen Thanh Hao, and Ma Tan Loc. The project grew out of two problems visible across the Mekong Delta: rising plastic waste and the uncontrolled spread of water hyacinth, a fast-growing river weed that clogs waterways and disrupts life for local communities.

The company connects the two. It harvests water hyacinth and processes it into eco-friendly packaging, turning an environmental nuisance into a raw material and offering an alternative to plastic at the same time.

Technology runs through the whole operation, from sourcing and shaping to quality control and traceability, along with a digital system linking growing areas, production, and customers. But the focus stays on the product and the communities around it. According to Hoang Khanh, the team has already moved past the idea stage into commercialization, with a product line that includes molded fruit trays and boxes, cup coasters, and plates made from water hyacinth and lotus leaves.

Over the next five years, GreenShield Mekong aims to become a leading biomaterials and green packaging producer in Vietnam and expand into international markets, while creating local livelihoods and keeping its value chain transparent.

Three to watch

Different industries, different founders, different markets. What these three share is a starting point: a real, everyday problem. A wallet that keeps getting fuller. A hiring process that reads paper instead of people. A weed taking over the rivers of the Delta.

All three are just getting started. They are worth keeping an eye on.