The Fan Choice award has gone to DesignBold, a Vietnamese startup that provides an easy-to-use visual editing tool, at Echelon Asia Summit 2017, one of the largest technology events in Southeast Asia.

Poladrone, a Malaysian startup that builds drones used in plantations, has bagged the Judges’ Choice award.

It is believed that the technology startup ecosystem in the private sector is growing and is increasingly becoming more important in South East Asia. Therefore, sStartups in Southeast Asia pulled in more moolah than ever before from investors in 2016.

According to Boston Consulting Group, Vietnam has been the fastest growing middle class in Southeast Asia. As The World Bank has ranked it in the 78th place in its “ease of doing business index”. Moreover, many young Vietnamese has studied abroad and returned with valuable entrepreneurial knowledge and understanding of the global markets. As such, the foreign and local investors have started to notice and pour money into Vietnam’s startups due to its great potentials. For example, it’s a big local market of more than 90 million people, internet penetration rate of 30 percent, mobile subscription of 145% and young and talented developers working there. Therefore, gradually, Vietnam has become one of the more intriguing startup scenes in the region.

One of the fun things is, when you take a step back from Vietnam and look at the best-performing companies, you will likely find that the least loud companies and founders are the best-performing ones. Maybe this is the best-kept secret of Vietnam’s startup ecosystem, and we proud to say that DesignBold is one of those.

Founded in September 2015 by Hung Dinh, the man behind one of the biggest Joomla templates marketplaces in the world. The first thing he did was build the best tool as possible. We would not boast about our product on media but always endeavor to genuinely care to provide the best product to our respective audiences. We talk to our users every day and feed on their feedbacks to make our product better.

DesignBold empowers users to get access to thousands of nicely-designed ready-made templates. Our users are just some clicks away from a great looking presentation, Facebook ads, or banners, to name but a few. DesignBold has positioned itself to be a more user-friendly, and time efficient platform than Photoshop; but more flexibility than Canva. It is unique because would be a service where pro designers can contribute and gain revenue from their designs. The sharing system would let normal users can use professional designs.

There is no doubt that Vietnam can produce companies of Misfit and VNG quality and size, but there’s always a grain of salt. However, it also makes this startup ecosystem so fascinating to watch.

DesidnBold is making its ways to global venture and your support is our motivation!