The founders of Coc Coc have denied that they have given up the search engine, which is a big rival to Google in Vietnam.
DealStreetAsia, the website on South East Asia’s investments, has reported that Coc Coc, a Vietnamese search engine, has changed hands. Two of three founding members of Coc Coc are no longer in their positions, while the third would leave in the time to come.
The founder who has stayed with Coc Coc is Le Van Thanh.
The website said on a Linkedln account, Nguyen Duc Ngoc said that he had stopped working at Coc Coc in December 2014 and had been working for Atlassian, a software firm, since March 2015.
Meanwhile, Nguyen Thanh Binh has reportedly left and set up a business of his own, though he still has relations with Coc Coc.
The two founders have reportedly sold their shares to Victor Lavrenko, a CEO from Russia, and some other investors.
Zing.vn has also reported the departure of Coc Coc’s founders, though Binh has said he is still working for Coc Coc.
The website quoted Binh as saying that he had just moved to HCM City. He declined to comment further.
Meanwhile, the list of 30 top technology founders in South East Asia released by TechInAsia showed that the representative of Coc Coc is Victor Lavrenko, not the three Vietnamese founders.
An employee at Coc Coc, who asked to be anonymous, said that Thanh and Binh were involved in small business projects only (after the Russian CEO took office).
However, Coc Coc’s media representative, whom Zing.vn contacted, said that the founders and workers were still working at Coc Coc.
Meanwhile, Nguyen Thanh Binh, a founder of Coc Coc, denied that he had left, as quoted in Buu Dien newspaper.
Binh said that he was still working for Coc Coc, and though Ngoc was no longer there, Ngoc did not intend to sell his stake in Coc Coc.
“Ngoc sees Coc Coc as his flesh and flood,” he said.
Binh even sent a selfie he took on October 16 afternoon at Coc Coc’s office in HCM City. And Buu Dien noted that Binh answered the newspaper’s mail from his Coc Coc account email “…@coccoc.vn”.
Binh said he and the other founders had always been open about Coc Coc’s development process.
“The three of us (Binh, Ngoc and Thanh) began thinking about developing a search engine in Vietnam when we studied at Lomonosov University in Moscow. Victor Lavrenko showed his interest in the idea and gave support in finance and technology. As for me, Victor is a co-founder like me, Thanh and Ngoc,” he said.
Source: vietnamnet.vn