The endurance of Stringee

Ending April 2023, Stringee reported that it has successfully raised financing for the Series A round from the Vietnam Growth Investment Fund DAIWA-SSIAM III, which is co-managed by SSI Fund Management Company (SSIAM) and Daiwa Corporate Investment Co., Ltd.

Emigrate

Stringee is a comprehensive communication platform for businesses, providing 2 main solutions: Stringee API helps to embed features of listening, calling (voice/video), SMS, and chat directly into existing applications/websites of businesses. StringeeX multi-channel customer care switchboard software helps businesses connect with customers through many channels such as calling, Live Chat, Facebook, Zalo, email, and SMS. Another big difference is that Stringee uses cloud computing technology to provide services, also known as SaaS (software as a service) model.

This method helps the company to deploy to customers 90% faster than traditional solutions and flexible payment according to monthly needs.

Stringee has over 1,000 corporate customers in Vietnam. Corporate clients have great loyalty and predictable cash flow, unlike individual customers, who must continually subsidize to maintain users, which is why is no longer important in the present internet winter scenario.

Second, if SaaS companies invest in advertising and promotion to recruit consumers in the first year, the gross profit in the subsequent years can be up to 85%. Reusing the service costs only infrastructure. SaaS companies like Stringee entering their 6th year are more appealing since they have passed the stage of spending more than 40% of yearly sales on research and product development (typically in 1, or 2 years). top SaaS firms).

Stringee uses the fresh money to target similar customers in India and increase its major client base in Vietnam, which are organizations in banking, securities, insurance, finance, etc. Mr. Nguyen Ba Luan, Stringee's Co-founder and Operations Director, claimed that although Vietnam's CPaaS and Cloud Contact Center market is $170 million, India's is $1 billion with a growth rate of $170 million.

The company has conducted marketing efforts in India and found that many organizations still use analog PBX, making the migration to the cloud slow. India, with a market approximately 6 times larger than Vietnam and similar recruitment costs and space, has few Stringee-like enterprises. Thus, Stringee wants to capitalize on this market. Mr. Luan described India as the Vietnamese market 4-5 years ago.

Water up, boat up

Mr. Luan and co-founder Dau Ngoc Huy established Stringee six years ago, their second project. They worked at Viettel, studied at Hanoi University of Science and Technology, and founded Bomchat together. This Vietnam-based internet calling and messaging app predates Zalo and Facebook. In 2014, Zalo, KakaoTalk, and Line (Korea) marketing and user sponsorship initiatives overtook Bomchat in Vietnam.

Therefore, with Stringee, the Company focuses on business customers by providing a set of tools to implement calling and messaging features on their applications. "For example, VOV Doctor 24, instead of building video calling and chatting features, using Stringee will have better costs and faster service deployment," said Mr. Luan.

However, according to Mr. Luan, the first time was not easy for Stringee. Firstly, this model is still new, so it takes time to convince investors. Second, personnel in this field are rare because of difficult voice and video processing technologies and need a lot of experience working with telecommunications systems. Finally, the self-developed enterprise toolkit strategy requires companies to have an IT department to deploy, resulting in a small initial scale.

Work, build, and focus on core industries is how Stringee exists. Realizing that the need for customer care in securities companies is very large, the Company focuses on serving this customer group. The results were better than expected when Stringee's seeding round came from an industry player, VNDirect.

In 2018, Stringee launched StringeeX multi-channel customer care call center solution. This is a prepackaged service, businesses only need to register and use, and is suitable for the scale of technology investment of most businesses in Vietnam.

Stringee's customer growth also improved and led to further funding rounds from Zone Startups Ventures (in 2021) and more recently, DAIWA-SSIAM III. On average, the Company's system handles 2.5 million minutes of calls per day. According to Mr. Luan, this number is equivalent to the daily processing capacity of some telecommunications operators in Vietnam.

Vietnam's telecommunications market is Stringee's playground. Mr. Luan said these corporations don't care since the market is too small. Companies competing with telecom providers have two options: combine when the market is vast, or expand into new markets. Stringee chose the second choice.

This is also consistent with the personality of Mr. Luan and his co-founder, Dau Ngoc Huy, who refuses to be constrained within the framework and is also the main motivation for both of them to start their own businesses again. "When I start a business, I can only do what I'm passionate about," said Mr. Luan.