Vietnam gets its Silicon Valley

Recent Vietnamese graduates looking for an English language teacher There’s an app for that. Or hunting the best bowl of pho in your Hanoi neighbourhood There’s now an app for that too.

A decade ago, such technology would likely have been developed in California’s Silicon Valley, but today those apps are being churned out by Vietnam’s start-up sector—an industry driven by local techies trained overseas but returning home to prowl for opportunities.

The sector’s growth in a young tech-hungry nation has caught the eye of foreign firms—French President Francois Hollande on Wednesday leads a cohort of businessmen to meet tech investors in Ho Chi Minh City.

Much of the technology, which also includes popular mobile games and ecommerce software, is being produced for local consumers in Vietnam, where the median age is 30 and internet connectivity is rapidly expanding.

“The local market is large, young, fast growing, and not fully tapped,” said Eddie Tang, of 500 Startups, a venture with a $10 million pot—mostly of foreign cash—to splurge on tech enterprises for Vietnamese users or made by local developers.