Eleven years ago, before Vietnam had a startup week, before Shark Tank Vietnam aired its first season, and before "ecosystem" became a word people used without irony, a small pitching event called CrowdPitch started putting early-stage founders in front of a paying audience in Ho Chi Minh City. The premise was simple and a little unusual for the time: the crowd, not a panel, decided who walked away with money.
This Sunday, September 13, CrowdPitch returns after a one-year break with its first episode in a new format, filmed at SIHUB and released afterwards as a web series. The event itself is a modest affair, five startups, five judges, two comedians hosting, two hours on a Sunday evening. What makes it worth noting is less the format and more who is still showing up to run it.
A Decade Of The Same People Doing The Unglamorous Work
Quynh-Huong Duong, CrowdPitch's co-founder, has been organising pitch nights in Saigon since the mid-2010s, a period when the city's founder scene was mostly co-working spaces, meetup groups and a handful of foreign-educated returnees testing whether Vietnam was ready for them. Many of the events from that era have quietly disappeared. CrowdPitch is one of the few that kept going, through venue changes, format experiments and a pandemic.
Her stated reason for bringing it back is pointedly practical. "For an early-stage startup, funding is only part of the challenge," she says. "You also need your first customers, supporters, and people willing to talk about what you're building." The new format is built around a sales pitch rather than an investor pitch, which is a quiet acknowledgement that for most Vietnamese founders in 2026, the first cheque is more likely to come from a customer than a fund.
The judging panel reflects a similar long-tenured cast. Chrystie Dao, Managing Director of the Vietnam Silicon Valley Foundation, comes from one of the earliest institutional efforts to build an accelerator model in Vietnam. Tony Ho, Founder and CEO of Reclub, and Dr. Michael Liebmann, Co-founder and CEO of Dream Lab AI, represent the operator side. Sakshi Jawa, Co-founder and COO of qode, brings a product lens, and Vân Trần, Founder of Saigon Improv House, is there for the part of pitching that has nothing to do with spreadsheets.
Notably, the judges do not decide who gets funded. Their job is to pressure-test the businesses and help the audience understand what they are looking at. The audience votes.
How The Money Actually Moves
CrowdPitch runs as a non-profit initiative. Of every VND 200,000 online ticket, half goes directly to the startup the ticket holder votes for, and the other half covers filming and production. It is not venture capital, and nobody involved pretends it is. It is closer to a structured way for founders to get their friends, family and early believers into one room and convert some of that goodwill into a first sale.
The five startups pitching on Sunday are Ren, an AI-powered journaling app; Koraï, a craft beer brand with a social impact model; Tutora, a tutor-matching platform; FireScroll, a gamified anti-doomscrolling app; and Veasyble, a retail visibility tool for brands and retailers. None is a household name, which is rather the point.
Why The Comedy
Hosting duties go to Ankita Ghosh, who produces headliner shows through Saigon International Comedy, and Annie Yang, a visiting comedian from Indonesia with more than a decade on stage. The organisers are clear that the founders are not the punchline. The humour is aimed at the shared absurdities of building something from nothing.
The tagline, "Startup is No Joke," is doing double duty. It is a wink at the format and a fair summary of how the organisers seem to view their own role: not as promoters, but as people who have watched this ecosystem grow for over a decade and still think a room full of strangers deciding to back a founder is worth filming.
Episode 1, "Built in Vietnam," takes place Sunday, September 13, 6:30 to 8:30 PM at SIHUB, 123 Trương Định, Ho Chi Minh City. Tickets are VND 200,000 online and VND 250,000 at the door.