HÀ NỘI — Nine Vietnamese outstanding start-up teams from different countries around the world joined the final round of the VietChallenge 2019 on September 7 (local time) in the US.

VietChallenge is an annual start-up competition for Vietnamese entrepreneurs worldwide, hosted by the Association of Vietnamese Students and Professionals in the US. The final round is held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which was rank as the best school in the world by the Quacquarelli Symonds World University Ranking during seven continuous years since 2012.

The competition is an activity under the project “Supporting National Innovative Start-up Ecosystem to 2025”, or often called project 844, chaired by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST).

This is the fourth year the competition has been held. More than 400 documents were sent to the organiser in the first round.

The first prize of the VietChallenge 2019 final contest was awarded to Medlink – a platform for direct connection between pharmaceutical companies and pharmacies. Medlink application was created by the Ecomedic Co Ltd with the purpose of accompanying retail pharmacies, providing websites for pharmaceutical companies and phone applications for pharmacies, allowing them to take orders online from pharmaceutical companies without advertising or at any cost.

It is estimated that Việt Nam has about 2,000 pharmaceutical companies.

The second prize was given to VVN AI solution, which provides artificial intelligence solutions for image and text recognition.

It also applies applications in automating transaction processes at stores and banks to save time, increase security and improve customer experience. The solution helps businesses optimise costs and improve quality while increasing competitiveness in the current digital business environment.  

The third prize belonged to the TiMobile team from Indonesia and Graam from Việt Nam. TiMobile is a solution that automatically replaces the recipient's ringtone with a specific video placed by the caller, while Graam offers businesses a handy TCall Centre solution on the Cloud platform.

Attending the VietChallenge 2019 and awarding the winners, Deputy Minister of Science and Technology Trần Văn Tùng said the MoST encouraged Vietnamese students to start-up with global thinking and then returning to contribute to the homeland.

Connecting with famous universities in the US such as MIT, Tufts and Stanford, where many excellent Vietnamese students have studied, was a good occasion for Vietnamese students to exchange experiences on start-up, he said. — VNS