The country also has a culture around corporate venture capital that is particularly active compared regional neighbors

Thailand is the second largest economy in Southeast Asia. It boasts 70 million people, a gigantic tourism industry and a world famous cuisine.

Unfortunately, it cannot claim to have produced a tech unicorn.

According to the e27 2018 Southeast Asia Startup Ecosystem Report, the most notable Thai investment from 2018 was an investment into Eatigo by TripAdvisor. The deal is rumoured to be about US$10 million.

So what can the country do to boost these numbers?

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For Tarit Nimmanwudipong the Head of Commercial at True Digital Park, he wanted to focus on building an offline community. True Digital Park is a gigantic tech university set to open in the heart of Bangkok in the coming months.

At Echelon Asia Summit 2019, Nimmanwudipong elaborated to Thaddeus Koh, a co-founder of e27.

“People like you (Koh) and me usually meet at this kind of event (Echelon), which is great, but it’s only once or twice a year, which is not quite healthy. We build TDP, to put people under one roof. I can meet you every day and still have time to go back and work on my stuff. I think that is very important,” he said.

Portions of the park will be free to the public and True Digital Park wants to integrate events that will bring in people who don’t work there to try and build and ecosystem connected to the park.

This also includes residential buildings in the general area and Nimmanwudipong said True Digital Park is flirting with a plan that allows people to live and work in the campus.

Besides bringing together the tech community, Thailand has a couple of fairly specific traits that may help produce the next unicorn.

One of them is an active corporate engagement with the startup ecosystem. For years, some of the most notable accelerators and investments have come from telcos, banks and real estate conglomerates. While this happens across Southeast Asia, it is particularly prevalent in Thailand.

Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) is a very real part of the country’s startup ecosystem.

Another sign that corporates play an important role is the status of fintech as the most successful sector in Thailand. Banks have spearheaded the CVC culture in Thailand, which naturally means the put money into fintechs.

This creates a feedback loop whereby Thai people see fintech companies breaking into the market and associate the growth with the startup scene as a whole.

“Fintech startups are the first that the mass people of Thailand realize that startups are coming. Then other kinds of startups come a bit later,” said Nimmanwudipong.

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When asked by Koh which startup he thinks has growth potential to help lead the ecosystem.

He pointed to Eko, a mobile chatting app for companies.

“The reason I like it, is thinking about the potential of expansion. It can be in any industry. We are trying to connect people. Different industries have unique characteristics but they all want to communicate.” 

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Photo by Zach Inglis on Unsplash

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