Axia goes international: Aims International Vietnam

AXIA in Vietnam? Unity is strength

Giuseppe was - in Enrico's memory - one of the most brilliant students he ever had. He was apparently easygoing and able to enjoy life, but when we started talking about serious things, invariably he demonstrated a level of competence two spans above his classmates. Curious, son of one of those tourism entrepreneurs who manage to transform the South into a paradise for those who want to discover the most beautiful and welcoming part of our country, he had always shown a real instinct for everything that could make him grow culturally and professionally. He was in the first group of students that Enrico had brought to the United States, inaugurating a fruitful collaboration between the Catholic University of Milano and Bentley University, in Waltham (Boston). He had also worked for a while with Axia before finding his way.

We had lost sight of each other until we received a phone call in 2018: "I'm Giuseppe, I'd like to tell you a story and make you a proposal: may I see you?". The answer could only be an invitation for a lunch at "our" trattoria, at Boris'. When we saw each other it was as if only a couple of days had gone since the last time. Giuseppe had got engaged to Bernie, a Croatian girl who – like him - was a real entrepreneur, and together they had decided that Artificial Intelligence was THE frontier. In the West, demand for programmers in that field constantly exceeds supply. What to do? Go to Vietnam, a country with almost 100 million inhabitants, very young on average, with a high cultural level and a great desire to do and to succeed: the paradise for a start-up. No sooner said than done. And after 4 years of experience, Giuseppe came to visit us because, knowing how we worked, he was sure it would be easy to export our operating model to Vietnam. After having been successful in opening a start-up for software production (which then had 30 employees, and still growing), why not replicate the experience by creating a subsidiary of AXIA in Vietnam? A trip to this extraordinary country, so similar in many ways to Italy, was enough to decide to venture into this new adventure.

We were incredibly timely. After 6 months of training in AXIA in Milan Anh, a brilliant Vietnamese woman who had come to Italy to complete her academic career, jumped on a plane and moved to Ho Chi Minh City to open a new office there. And the timeliness? Shortly after Anh's arrival, the Covid-19 pandemic broke out. We managed to work for two years developing and strengthening VinAXIA (the name we had chosen for our start-up), even though the growth was not what we expected. And then, once again, chance has a hand in it. A few years after its birth AXIA had started to collaborate with AIMS International Italia, a company operating in the same field. The two founders of the respective companies (Enrico for AXIA, Pierangelo Favero for AIMS) had been colleagues at Mercuri Urval, where, in addition to becoming friends, they had learned to respect each other's skills. Periodically it happened that the two companies cooperated on common projects. When, towards the end of 2021, a new collaboration opportunity came up, Enrico checked on the AIMS International website to see if an affiliated company already existed in Vietnam. When he saw that the AIMS network had no local partner, he asked Pierangelo if it made sense to have VinAXIA join the network. If you opened this window you already know how it turned out: AXIA and AIMS Italy allied to create more opportunities for growth and consolidation of the new Vietnamese company, and AIMS International Vietnam benefited from this alliance, growing and strengthening.