companies
VNG Corporation
Vietnam's largest internet company, publicly listed, building the Zalo messaging platform's Kiki voice assistant and the from-scratch Vietnamese KiLM language model.
VNG was founded in Ho Chi Minh City in September 2004 as VinaGame, an online gaming publisher, before rebranding to VNG and expanding into messaging, fintech, cloud, and digital content. Its Zalo messaging app, launched in 2012, is used by a large majority of Vietnam's population and remains the country's leading domestic alternative to Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. The company began layering AI into Zalo starting around 2022, releasing Kiki, a Vietnamese-language voice assistant aimed initially at in-car use, and KiLM, a 13-billion-parameter large language model VNG says it built from scratch on Vietnamese data and which ranked competitively against international open models on local-language benchmarks. VNG completed a listing on Vietnam's UPCoM exchange under ticker VNZ in 2023 after an earlier attempted Nasdaq IPO did not go forward, and it reported roughly 3,300 employees in its most recent annual report; founder Le Hong Minh remains CEO, with co-founder Vuong Quang Khai leading Zalo and its AI efforts.
- Founded
- 2004
- Headquarters
- Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
- Sector
- consumer
Tools
- Kiki
Kiki is a Vietnamese voice assistant that handles music, directions, communication, calculations, information searches, and daily tools.
- KiLM (Zalo AI)
KiLM is Zalo AI’s Vietnamese large language model, trained from scratch for Vietnamese-language tasks and AI applications.