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🤯 The End of Sendo: Vietnam's #2 Marketplace Burned $130M and Lost to Shopee

🤯 The End of Sendo: Vietnam's #2 Marketplace Burned $130M and Lost to Shopee

How Sendo lost the subsidy war, watched the Tiki merger collapse, and couldn't make its grocery pivot work.

Admond Lee
July 05, 2026

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Hey Founders,

Welcome to The Runway Ventures — a weekly newsletter where I deep dive into failed startup stories to help you become the top 1% founder by learning from their mistakes with actionable insights.

Today's story is about how Vietnam's #2 e-commerce marketplace burned $130M fighting Shopee, saw its Tiki merger collapse, and is now quietly bowing out after 14 years. Let's get to it! 🚀

Today at a Glance:

☠️ 1 Failed Startup → Sendo
⚠️ 2 Mistakes → Traded the rural moat for a subsidy war
🧠 3 Lessons Learned → Ecosystem breadth doesn't create customer loyalty
🔗 The Runway Insights → ElevenLabs' seed deck, from $2M pre-seed to $11B
💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar → Qashier closes $6M to scale its unified merchant operating system for payments and financial services across Southeast Asia

☠️ 1 Failed Startup: Sendo

🚀 The Rise of Sendo

🇻🇳 Founded in 2012 by Nguyen Dac Viet Dung (Chairman), Tran Hai Linh (CEO), and Nguyen Phuong Hoang (Deputy CEO) inside FPT Corporation, Sendo was Vietnam's "Made in Vietnam" e-commerce marketplace connecting small merchants with buyers across all 63 provinces.

🕺🏻🕺🏻🕺🏻🕺🏻 Founders’ Story

Sendo started as an internal FPT project in 2012, spearheaded by Nguyen Dac Viet Dung — a programmer who'd led FPT Software's overseas dev teams. Tran Hai Linh, an NTU grad who spent 6 months unemployed in Singapore, joined FPT and became the youngest CEO of an FPT subsidiary at 28.

🌱 The bet was simple → build an e-commerce platform for the 70 million Vietnamese the foreign giants ignored.

The Problem — 🥲 Vietnam had rising internet users but no real e-commerce infrastructure. Buying online meant forum posts, cash meetups, and hoping the seller actually showed up.
- No integrated delivery or payment services existed for the mass market
- Foreign entrants like Lazada focused on Hanoi and HCMC, ignoring 70 million Vietnamese in tier-2 cities and rural provinces
- Small merchants had no way to reach buyers beyond their local circles
The Solution — 🛒 Sendo built a "Made in Vietnam" C2C/B2C marketplace for Vietnamese merchants and consumers.
- Targeted tier-2 cities and rural provinces where 60-70% of orders would eventually come from
- Hybrid monetisation — small fees plus Google-powered Shop Ads instead of the high commissions Vietnamese SMEs couldn't afford

🇻🇳🌱 In short, Sendo was Vietnam's homegrown e-commerce marketplace built for the 70 million Vietnamese the foreign giants ignored.

Sendo's early years were quiet but steady. By 2014, they had 70,000 sellers and 120,000 orders a month.

🎉🥳 That December, they ran their first big flash sale and hit 10,000 orders in a single day — proof the model actually worked.

💰 A month later, Japan's SBI Holdings, Econtext Asia, and BEENOS took a combined 33% stake for around $18M — Sendo's first major international validation.

Then came the acceleration.

💰💰 By November 2019, they closed a $61M Series C, bringing total funding to over $130M.

That same quarter, Sendo overtook Tiki to become Vietnam's #2 e-commerce site with 30.9 million monthly visits — trailing only Shopee.

🏔️ At its peak, Sendo:

hit an annualised GMV of $1 billion
served 10-12 million active buyers across all 63 provinces
had 300,000-500,000 registered sellers and 17 million SKUs
posted peak revenue of 547 billion VND (FY2019)
employed around 1,000 people
raised over $130M from SBI, SoftBank, BEENOS, FPT, Kasikornbank, and EV Growth

But growth wasn't free.

🔥 To hit that $1B GMV, Sendo burned through a net loss of 1,586 billion VND in 2019 alone — nearly 3x their revenue. Every promotion, every voucher, every free-shipping campaign was subsidised by capital they'd have to keep raising.

📉 The Fall of Sendo

Then something changed.

🤑💰 Shopee and Lazada had backers with deeper pockets (Tencent and Alibaba respectively) and they were happy to burn cash for years to buy market share. Sendo couldn't match that pace.

By early 2020, Tran Hai Linh was having conversations with shareholders that no CEO wants to have.

📌 Here’s what happened to Sendo:

❝

I had to discuss with shareholders and co-founders that perhaps the goal of being the number one e-commerce platform was no longer a viable option for the company.

— shared by Tran Hai Linh (Sendo CEO) at the Tech in Asia Saigon Summit

🌱 Built for the 70 million

Sep 2012 — 🌱 Sendo.vn publicly launched in Ho Chi Minh City as a domestic C2C marketplace out of FPT Online.
Dec 2014 — SBI, Econtext Asia, and BEENOS took a combined 33% stake for around $18M — Sendo's first major international validation.
2016 — 💳 SenPay obtained an e-wallet licence from the State Bank of Vietnam, making Sendo the first Vietnamese e-commerce firm with its own e-wallet.
16 Aug 2018 — 💰 Closed a $51M (Series B) led by SBI, with SoftBank Ventures Korea, BEENOS, Daiwa PI, SKS Ventures, and FPT participating.
20 Nov 2019 — 💰 Closed a $61M (Series C), bringing total capital raised to over $130M. Kasikornbank and EV Growth joined.
- Sendo overtook Tiki as Vietnam's #2 e-commerce site with 30.9M monthly visits, behind only Shopee.
- Peak revenue of 547B VND — but a net loss of 1,586B VND, nearly 3x revenue.

🥀 The cash-burn war Sendo couldn't win

5 Jun 2020 — Vietnam's E-commerce and Digital Economy Agency received formal notification of a planned Tiki–Sendo merger — the 2 domestic champions trying to consolidate against the foreign giants.
Late 2020 — 💔 Merger talks collapsed over shareholder valuation disputes and regulatory scrutiny. Sendo was left isolated with no way to raise the kind of capital Shopee and Lazada were pulling from their parent companies.
Jul 2021 — 🚀 Sendo Farm launched in HCMC on the day the city entered strict COVID lockdown — delivering vegetables and meat while wet markets were shut.
Late 2022 — After China reopened post-COVID, Sendo leadership travelled there to study Pinduoduo's community group-buy model, doubling down on Sendo Farm.
Aug 2023 — 📱 Sendo Farm partnered with TikTok Shop, selling 180 tons of produce in a week with 65 tons on peak day. The model was working — for a moment.
Nov 2024 — 📦 Sendo Farm hit peak scale: 8,000 m² of fulfilment centres, 5,000 SKUs, ~50 tons/day to ~10,000 daily customers from the Hanoi hub alone.
15 Apr 2025 — 🚨 Sen Đỏ announced it would shut down the traditional Sendo marketplace after ~9 years against Shopee and Lazada, redirecting all resources into Sendo Farm — fresh food, farm produce, and FMCG.
~1 Jul 2026 — Sen Đỏ (the FPT subsidiary behind Sendo) notified customers and partners that Sendo Farm would wind down, running final promotions through 9 Jul.
10 Jul 2026 — 🏁 Sendo Farm's operations cease — the effective shutdown date, marking FPT's step back from B2C e-commerce after ~14 years.

Sendo did the hard part right — a Made in Vietnam marketplace that reached the 70 million rural Vietnamese the giants ignored, raised over $130M, hit $1B GMV, and became the country's #2 site.

🩸 But scale doesn't save you when the unit economics never work. Shopee and Lazada could burn cash forever, the Tiki merger fell through, and even the asset-light Sendo Farm pivot hit a wall — neighbourhood partners can't run the 24/7 cold chain fresh grocery needs, and physical players like Bach Hoa Xanh and WinMart already owned that ground.

After 14 years, FPT is quietly closing the door.

Want to learn more about Sendo’s downfall?

⚠️ 2 Mistakes

Mistake 1: Traded the rural moat for a subsidy war

Sendo's founders were smart. They didn’t fight the foreign giants head-on.

🇻🇳 Instead, they focused solely on the domestic market, targeting the 70 million Vietnamese in tier-2 cities that foreign platforms ignored.

That was the moat.

⚠️ Then by 2018-2019, Sendo was running Shopee and Lazada's playbook — free shipping, flash sales, vouchers. Against competitors backed by Tencent and Alibaba with effectively unlimited capital.

The math was ugly:

2019 revenue: 547B VND
2019 net loss: 1,586B VND
Subsidies cost ~3x what they generated

At the time, this made sense because Sendo had just hit #2 in Vietnam and closed a $61M Series C. Momentum felt real.

🙏🏻🤺 But you don't outburn Tencent and Alibaba. Sendo confused market position with market strategy — being #2 doesn't mean you can play the #1's game.

Mistake 2: Stacked features but never built real loyalty

❝

If there is no free shipping, no product promotion, no flash sale or voucher, the customer just stops purchasing.

— shared by Pham Duc, former Sendo employee (2014-2021)

🤔 That's the whole moat, exposed. At peak scale — 10-12M active buyers, SenPay in your pocket, SenMall in your app. But the moment promotions stopped, so did sales.

When subsidies pulled back, their revenue collapsed:

📉 2019 revenue: 547B VND
📉📉 2021 revenue: 181B VND
📉📉📉 Q1 2023 revenue: 55B VND

A steep multi-year decline — only possible when there's no loyal base to fall back on.

🧠 3 Lessons Learned

Lesson 1: Never fight a capital war you can't fund

✌🏻 Sendo's founders had a clever thesis — skip the foreign giants' battleground and win the 70 million underserved Vietnamese instead.

But when Shopee and Lazada started subsidising everything, Sendo matched them. And that's when a differentiated business became undifferentiated — structurally guaranteed to lose the capital war.

🌮 Key Takeaways:

When your competitor has infinite capital, out-thinking beats out-spending.
Differentiation ends the moment you adopt your competitor's playbook.

🛠️ Operator Playbook:

📊 Run a "capital endurance" audit before joining any price war
- Calculate your monthly burn ÷ your best-funded competitor's monthly burn.
- Check parent-company backers. A competitor backed by Tencent, Alibaba, or Sea Group has effectively unlimited runway relative to any $100M-funded independent.
🚫 Define the game you're NOT playing (and enforce it)
- Sendo's original moat was rural + hybrid monetisation — a positioning that dissolved once flash sales became the dominant playing field.
- Ask: "If we can't win on capital, what do we win on?" Geography, vertical focus, curation, or supplier relationships.

Lesson 2: Ecosystem breadth doesn't create customer loyalty

Sendo had SenPay for payments, SenMall for brands, and delivery across 63 provinces. But at peak scale, purchasing stopped the moment promotions did — the moat was never there.

🌮 Key Takeaways:

Loyalty is behavioural, not architectural.
You're renting demand if your retention curve tracks your promo calendar.

🛠️ Operator Playbook:

📉 Measure promo-free retention explicitly
- Every quarter, define one 30-day window with zero paid promotions running.
- Track what % of your active users still transact in that window.
- If it drops below 30%, you don't have loyal customers — you have subsidised traffic.
- Oh, and use Amplitude or Mixpanel to build the cohort view.
🧪 Stress-test each "ecosystem" feature against churn
- Pick one feature you claim is a moat (loyalty points, wallet cashback, free shipping tier — whatever).
- Temporarily disable it for a small random cohort for 30 days.
- Measure churn rate, complaint volume, and revenue delta before deciding whether to keep investing in it.
- If nothing changes, that feature is a cost, not a moat.

Lesson 3: Different category, different playbook

After the Tiki merger collapsed, Sendo leaders travelled to China to study community group buy models like Pinduoduo, and came back with the Sendo Farm blueprint — housewives and mom-and-pop shops as Farm Hubs.

But fresh grocery needs 24/7 logistics that neighbourhood partners cannot run.

🌮 Key Takeaways:

Business models are category-specific. What works for shelf-stable goods can fail for perishables.
Before copying a foreign winner, diagnose which category conditions made their model work.
Asset-light distribution has a hard ceiling in any category that needs 24/7 infrastructure.

🛠️ Operator Playbook:

🔍 Reverse-engineer the source category before copying the model
- Ask "why did this work in the original category?" — not "how do we replicate the mechanics?"
- The mechanics that look copyable often ride on infrastructure and category economics that don't travel.
🏬 Study how physical incumbents solve the same problem
- Bach Hoa Xanh and WinMart use existing store networks as fulfilment nodes.
- Their unit economics are structurally better because retail traffic already paid for the footprint.

🔗 The Runway Insights

ElevenLabs' seed deck, from $2M pre-seed to $11B (Read)
How we booked 614 meetings with one inbound agent (Read)
From $20 Upwork gigs to $1.7M/year (Read)
The founder's guide to secondaries: getting liquid before the exit (Read)
Your unfair advantage in the age of AI (Read)

💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar

Qashier closes $6M to scale its unified merchant operating system for payments and financial services across Southeast Asia (More)
dConstruct raises $125M (Series A) to advance spatial and embodied AI powering next-generation robotics from Singapore (More)
Amity Robotics bags $7M (Seed) to expand its AI concierge robotics platform from Southeast Asian malls to global markets (More)

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That’s all for today

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed today's issue. More than that, I hope you’ve learned some actionable tips to build and grow your business.

You can always write to me by simply replying to this newsletter and we can chat.

See you again next week.

- Admond

Disclaimer: The Runway Ventures content is for informational purposes only. Unless otherwise stated, any opinions expressed above belong solely to the author.

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