How a Vietnamese beauty startup landed a US$38 million exit

LONG before Hannah Nguyen built skincare startup Skinetiq, she was experimenting with and creating natural makeup products on a coffee farm in rural Vietnam.

As a child, Nguyen would crush berries from the garden into makeshift lipstick and blush, while she used coffee branches as hair curlers. “I was into beauty since I was five or six,” she says in a recent interview with Tech in Asia.

Years later, that early fascination turned into a business and, eventually, a multimillion-dollar exit. Skinetiq, which Nguyen co-founded in 2020 with Vietnamese entrepreneur Bui Ngoc Anh, was valued at around US$38 million after the team agreed to sell a 75 per cent equity stake to India’s consumer goods giant Marico last month.