HO CHI MINH CITY — At InnoEx 2026, Vietnam's largest startup and innovation expo held in Ho Chi Minh City on the 20th of last month, visitors streamed steadily into the booth of Dayladau, an hourly hotel booking platform. Dayladau is one of five Vietnamese startups selected for support by Lotte Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Lotte Group. Visitors nodded with interest as staff explained that guests can book rooms for only as many hours as they need, and that the service quality is a step above that of existing local lodging operators.
Nung Nguyen, chief executive of Dayladau, was until a few years ago an ordinary Airbnb host running short-term rentals for foreign tourists in Hanoi. When the pandemic cut off tourist traffic, the CEO turned to domestic customers. Demand was rising among Vietnamese looking for a place to rest, as the country has few leisure spaces in urban centers. Dayladau was born that way, breaking the fixed frame of conventional lodging — check in at 3 p.m., check out at 11 a.m. the next day.
As the business grew, a new challenge emerged. With "flexible lodging," booking times were hard to predict, making it difficult to keep room management and service quality consistent. That was when Lotte Ventures stepped in. Along with $50,000 in funding, Lotte Ventures passed on operating expertise accumulated by affiliate Lotte Hotel in areas such as customer service and lodging quality control. As a result, Dayladau has grown into the most closely watched lodging platform startup in Vietnam.
"When people talk about nurturing startups, they think first of financial support such as investment, but for us the most important thing was developing our 'flexible lodging' business model into a global business," the CEO said. "To do that, we had to raise our service quality and operating capabilities to a high level, and that is exactly where Lotte's role mattered."
Dayladau and the other companies selected through L-CAMP Vietnam, Lotte Ventures' local startup program, repeatedly test their products and services at the business sites of Lotte affiliates, verifying and refining their commercial viability. It is a new win-win model that goes beyond simple funding, offering Lotte's business infrastructure as a growth platform for startups. Depending on the results of those trials, the startups can also sign formal contracts with affiliates or win the chance to expand into overseas markets such as South Korea.
Phan Anh Nguyen, chief executive of Raudio, a background music management platform also selected for the program, said Lotte's vast business ecosystem is a crucial opportunity for an early-stage startup to bring its products and services to a real market and test them. "For a startup, that means far more than simply receiving funding," the CEO said.
This affiliate-linked model has already produced results in South Korea. Nieder, a short-term job matching platform selected for the third L-CAMP cohort in 2017, validated its business model with Lotte Hotel and Lotte Global Logistics before raising a cumulative 18 billion won ($13 million) in investment. Klobot, a robot software company from the fourth cohort in 2018, built up trial experience at Lotte World Tower and Lotte Department Store and listed on the KOSDAQ market in 2024. Lotte plans to adapt this domestically proven model to local conditions in Vietnam.
Lotte's ultimate goal in transplanting its proven startup partnership model to Vietnam is to strengthen the local industrial ecosystem and contribute to economic growth. The company judges that rising incomes and economic growth in Vietnam are what will broaden its own local business base and make sustainable growth possible. The longer-term aim is to develop the relationship with Vietnam into a lasting economic partnership.
To that end, Lotte plans to expand partnership programs such as L-CAMP Vietnam, centered on Lotte Ventures, and to raise support per local startup from the current $80,000 to $200,000 within five years. "If the growth of local Vietnamese startups ultimately contributes to Vietnam's economic development, and Lotte Group's local business expands on that basis, it will create a win-win structure that benefits both Vietnam and Lotte," a Lotte official said.
