Justin Nguyen

Justin Nguyen is a General Partner at Monk's Hill Ventures, an early-stage Southeast Asian venture firm founded in 2014 by Peng T. Ong and Kuo-Yi Lim. He joined as an Operating Advisor in 2016, became a Partner in 2019, and was elevated to General Partner in 2021. Based in Ho Chi Minh City, he anchors the firm's Vietnam presence alongside its offices in Singapore and Jakarta.

Before investing, Justin spent more than two decades as a founder, operator and engineer, with roughly nine years each in Silicon Valley and in China. He founded Aspect Gaming, one of Asia's leading gaming-technology suppliers, which raised more than US$18 million. Earlier he served as China CEO of StarCite, where he helped pivot the business from a consumer dotcom into an enterprise SaaS company and grew it from zero to more than US$50 million in revenue before its exit. Across his career he has helped raise over US$80 million across roughly ten financing rounds for three startups in Silicon Valley, Shanghai and Vietnam.

He is known operationally for building world-class engineering teams, recruiting talent from companies such as Google, Alibaba and eBay. That operator background informs MHV's positioning as "entrepreneurs backing entrepreneurs" — partners who are former CEOs and CTOs. He also serves on or has served on the boards of numerous portfolio companies, including CoderSchool, ELSA, GoGet, INKR, Jio Health, Ordinary Folk, Saladin, Stellar, UI-licious and Upmesh, and is a board member of the Vietnam Private Capital Agency (VPCA).

• Invests at Pre-Series A and Series A, typically writing US$3M–US$7M checks and often leading rounds.
• Backs technology-led companies across Southeast Asia, with strong personal conviction in Vietnam as, in his words, "a fertile ground for Southeast Asia's next wave of tech innovation."
• Sector emphasis on B2B SaaS and fintech (areas he has publicly flagged as the biggest Vietnam opportunities), alongside healthcare, e-commerce/consumer, logistics and edtech.
• MHV applies "a first-principles approach" — breaking a business down to fundamentals rather than chasing trends — and looks to back "ambitious tech founders" with the discipline and drive to "improve the lives of millions of people in the region."
• Values founders who can build and recruit world-class teams and execute operationally — a reflection of Justin's own scaling-from-zero background.