The project founding team originates from Vietnam Open Source Development Joint Stock Company (VINADES). The company has nurtured and supported the Bidding Ecosystem team ever since DauThau.info was just a Software as a service (SaaS), until it officially became a Startup and developed into a complete ecosystem as it is today with the introduction of DauGia.Net and especially DauThau.Net with many modules.

VINADES is the first open source software company in Vietnam, specializing in managing the famous open source NukeViet, which is being used in thousands of big and small websites in all fields. NukeViet CMS has won the Vietnamese Talent Award in 2011. The Bidding Ecosystem project is also built on this foundation and is fully supported in terms of technology and engineering.

Thanks to being incubated from a more than 10 year old open source company, the project inherits many core technology platforms and experiences from small and medium size enterprises (SME). This is the reason why despite being a Startup project, it has been profitable from day one.

Our mentor who also directs the project is Mr. Nguyen The Hung (CEO of VINADES). He has more than 10 years of experience in operating businesses, and more than 5 years of experience in the public relation - marketing field. Since before the company’s establishment, Mr. The Hung has worked as a construction project manager with a full practicing certificate for 5 years. At the same time, he has also been a NukeViet webmaster community admin (from 2007 to 2021 with over 65,000 members participating), a judge and a mentor for the "Creative Summer of Writing Open Source Software Applications" contest, a member of the Appraisal Council for the Marketing & IT vocational training curriculum of the General Department of Vocational Training - Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, a speaker and a trainer on open source software (economic, legal, license...), a vice president of Vietnam Free and Open Source Software Club (VFOSSA).

In addition, the development and operation team of NukeViet CMS - NukeViet Core Team for more than 10 years has been directly involved in the development of the Bidding Ecosystem. The team consists of programming experts with more than 10 years of experience, which played a part in why NukeViet won the Vietnam Talent Award 2011.

On the other hand, the project also received the advice and development of many experts in the bidding field with more than 15 years of experience to create the best and fully featured experience for contractors. The sales and marketing teams are also filled with an experienced group of people to bring the Ecosystem to thrive in phase 1 which is DauThau.info software, which in just 3 years has more than 28,000 businesses and customers with almost zero marketing budget.

Bidding Ecosystem is the first comprehensive bidding ecosystem in Vietnam. The ecosystem includes many software to help businesses’s connectivity, such as:

Bid information analysis software - DauThau.info: The software supports businesses in the ecosystem to search for and analyze bidding information on public procurement, and projects with state budget sources. DauThau.info provides businesses/contractors with important information about new projects, plans, and bidding packages instead of having to search manually or read them in the newspapers. Other than that, the software also has the ability to analyze and cross-link raw data about contractors, procuring entities, bidding history..., thereby helping contractors see a lot of information in different aspects when preparing to bid, or even helping a contractor assess whether there is a close relationship between the contractor and the procuring entity or whether there is a sign of a “red/green group” among competing bidders. The birth of DauThau.info has contributed to creating a fair and square competitive bidding environment, bringing potential business opportunities for businesses when participating in the public procurement market.

Private sector bidding network - DauThau.Net (the heart of the bidding ecosystem): This is a trading platform system for business (B2B). Businesses wanting to buy or sell will easily find each other on DauThau.Net. The system supports many different forms of transactions from bidding to competitive offers (also supporting simple forms of purchasing such as an individual looking for a construction contractor, to complicated forms of bidding according to the procurement process of the Bidding Law). Businesses can create online portfolios, online store and online bidding on DauThau.Net.

Auction property searching software - DauGia.Net: DauGia.Net will help investors look for attractive auction properties in all fields that match the requirements and capabilities of users. The software can 24/24 filter, search, and proactively send found auction property information to investors via email. These are all preeminent features unseen yet in the market.

Our goal is to create a software system based on a large database that can understand the procuring needs of businesses and connect them in a smarter, faster and optimal way.

The idea of creating a Bidding Ecosystem started when we saw that the National Procurement Network had great potential to become an extremely effective B2B procurement platform but could not develop due to its limited features and government constraints. However, implementing a B2B platform is not easy, especially for an SME.

We all know that developing a B2B platform is extremely difficult, not because of the technical system, but because of the work after growing in size of the user base on the platform in order to make the platform effective and self-sufficient. While the platform is not yet large enough to self-balance, the only way to entice buyers and sellers into the platform is to use a lot of money to build, market and maintain the platform’s operation. Keeping the balance and creating transactions so that buyers and sellers do not leave the B2B platform is extremely difficult. A good example is how Uber and Grab "burnt money" to invite users and drivers into their system as well as to keep the balance for the platform. That's why they needed to raise capital so much. An SME like us doesn't have that much money to burn, nor can we raise capital with just an idea. We therefore put this idea aside.

This idea only officially returned to us when our DauThau.info software was interested by many businesses, users and when it developed explosively in 2019. The number of customers and businesses revenue increased sharply, accompanied by high demand of businesses. The development of DauThau.info has helped us pull tens of thousands of contractors and suppliers into the system and retain them even when no buyers have yet to join the system. We then had an idea: DauThau.info is the plan to balance the platform better than the "burning money" approach to build the platform. We call this idea the Bidding Ecosystem and boldly brand it a Startup, a special Startup that is profitable from the first day of operation.

On the topic of DauThau.info, this is a software born in early 2018, from an internal project of VINADES, developed for the bidding department to search for bidding packages of government agencies in the field of designing websites and portals.

At that time, like many other companies, the bidding department of VINADES had a very serious problem in the process of finding bid information: the public procurement portal made it very difficult to search, and did not have filters or send bid information via email; Some places (including bidding newspapers) only provide information in the form of electronic bidding bulletins in the form of PDF, XLS files, etc., which requires human resources to laboriously read and find the appropriate bids, not to mention the fact that the huge amount of work to look up, cross check or aggregate is not suitable for the small scale of human resources like VINADES had. In short, the services of searching and providing bid information at the time did not meet the needs of bidding related staffs at VINADES. We had this question: Why doesn’t a technology company like VINADES come up with a software solution to solve this problem? And from that DauThau.info was born!

Nearly 2 years after launch, DauThau.info has grown tremendously and has become an indispensable tool for contractors when participating in public procurement bidding. At the same time, the development team conducted further research into the market and found that in Vietnam there is no bidding platform for private sector businesses. While, in fact, a lot of corporations, large private enterprises regularly invite bids within their own systems. Most contractors and suppliers have difficulty when they want to participate in these projects because the information is not centralized. They will have to search through many sources and channels of different investors. Based on the existing platform of DauThau.info and the support of tens of thousands of contractors, the development team has expanded the scope of activities beyond a single software by adding a wide range of software to create an ecosystem of products and support services for businesses in the bidding and auction field. The Bidding ecosystem was officially born with DauThau.info in phase 1, and phase 2 started in December 2020 with the Private Sector Bidding Network - DauThau.Net.

The development roadmap of the Bidding Ecosystem will be divided into 3 phases:

Phase 1 (launched in 2018): Develop bidding information analysis software, DauThau.info in order to support businesses to participate in the public procurement market. Currently, DauThau.info has been completed with 11 software packages. At the same time, there have been more than 28,000 businesses in all fields, and more than 50,000 accounts regularly using the software.

Phase 2 (launched at the end of 2020): Develop a Private Sector Bidding Network, DauThau.Net based on the resource of phase 1, DauThau.info. DauThau.Net will be the platform to connect transactions of private businesses in the form of competitive bidding or competitive quotation. Having a common transactions platform will make it easier for businesses to connect with each other, save costs and improve procuring efficiency. At the same time, more than 28,000 contractors using DauThau.info are also ready to bid on private sector projects posted on DauThau.Net. Currently DauThau.Net is in Open Beta 1 version. We expect that after the release of Open Beta 2, the system will be complete to launch the official version. In the near future, many unique features will be added such as: Allow businesses to create virtual store; Allows online creation of portfolios; Allow online bidding; Upgrade to social networks to form an organization; etc.

Phase 3 (Future): After phase 2 is operating stably, the Bidding Ecosystem will move to phase 3, which is to deploy more supporting software tools, data exploiting with targets being business customers (contractors and procuring entities/investors).

The Bidding Ecosystem is built with the goal of comprehensive support for businesses in Vietnam in the bidding and auction field, and connect public and private sector procurement.

In phase 1, DauThau.info has been changing the public procurement process of contractors in Vietnam. Information on bidding is transparent, public and easily accessible to all businesses. Bidding data is also linked and analyzed to provide valuable information for businesses when participating in bidding. For small and capable contractors who have little to no relationship or are new to the bidding market, we offer the opportunity for them to enter this potentially lucrative market at minimal opportunity cost. For big contractors, we bring them the opportunity to streamline their process by using the software to automate the information searching process, which helps improve efficiency for their bidding department.

In the 2nd phase, DauThau.Net is expected to become the first private sector bidding network in Vietnam. For DauThau.Net, bidding activities are no longer confined to the framework of traditional bidding. Any activity of one party, whether it is a buyer or a seller, the system will find the other party that is most suitable for you to match the transaction. DauThau.Net not only has bidding/competitive bidding/invitation to bid/, but also will aim for a new generation of B2B platform that connects buyers and sellers thanks to its smart algorithms.

DauThau.Net ensures transparency, economic efficiency and safety. Data on the private sector bidding network DauThau.Net will be open data, using open standards. We pledge that Vietnam's first private sector bidding network will be a system where both technology and data will follow the trend that the world is implementing. This will make the system easy to integrate, connect and expand in the future, as well as ensure the highest transparency, economic efficiency and safety for the participants.