Vietnam is the second-largest coffee producer on earth, yet for decades its own coffee culture stayed stubbornly functional, coffee as a daily jolt of energy rather than a craft to be explored. That is changing fast. A young, urban, increasingly affluent generation is trading up, and a new wave of homegrown brands is turning the daily cup into something worth savouring.

It was against this backdrop that we first backed Every Half in 2024, a brand with a contrarian point of view and the rare team to deliver on it. While Arabica has long been synonymous with the specialty coffee world, Every Half set out to bring Fine Robusta and Liberica into the mix too. The mission? Genuinely special coffee, served in beautiful spaces, at a price every Vietnamese can enjoy every day.

We believe the most interesting opportunity in Vietnam's coffee boom sits neither at the premium end occupied by global names nor in the crowded mass market, but in the gap between them. That is exactly the space Every Half is building! We are pleased to share that we have doubled down on our partnership, participating in Every Half’s new funding round with Openspace Capital.

Turning a thesis into a scaled business

Since our first cheque, Every Half has done what the best founders do, turned a thesis into momentum.

Revenue has grown more than three-fold, and the store footprint has expanded from nine outlets to thirty-six, with Every Half moving beyond Ho Chi Minh City into new markets including Hanoi and Hoi An. Impressively, that growth has come without sacrificing discipline. Store-level economics have held firm, with mature stores running healthy mid-teens margins even as a large cohort of new openings ramps up. Rapid expansion usually comes at the cost of quality or unit economics. Every Half has protected both.

The recognition has followed. Every Half’s popular Fine Robusta won Gold at the 2025 Global Coffee Awards, providing external validation that this is world-class coffee, not just a well-designed local chain. The brand has been featured everywhere from Barista Magazine to the World AeroPress Championship. Its stores carry consistently outstanding 4.7-5.0 star customer ratings and its following continues to grow. Across its stores, Every Half maintains an average Google rating of 4.8 stars—a reflection of the consistently exceptional experience it delivers

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The team has levelled up alongside the business. To support the next phase of scaling, Every Half brought in a Chief Operating Officer, Michelle Nguyen, with 25 years of large-scale chained store operations experience, including running a  ~130-store footprint at Phúc Long and senior operating roles at McDonald's and Pizza Hut in Vietnam. That is precisely the operational backbone a fast-growing chain needs.

A Bolder Brand

Perhaps the most exciting development since our first investment is how the brand itself has evolved. Every Half began by talking about sustainability and farm-to-cup quality. However, what draws coffee lovers is curiosity: new flavours, new origins, new experiences, new stories. So, the brand distilled itself down to that one promise, making coffee unexpectedly interesting.

It's a positioning that turns Every Half's real strengths – its standout roastery, award-winning baristas, inventive drinks, distinctive spaces – into things customers can see, taste, and talk about, democratizing specialty coffee rather than gatekeeping it. That idea now has a look to match: a bold new identity built on a single ownable craft symbol and a confident embrace of purple in a sea of brown and beige. The icon captures the "in and out" of coffee-making. Provenance, process, and people go in, a refined, high-quality cup comes out. The icon will run consistently across cafés, packaging, and content. Together it builds a cohesive, scalable brand system that reinforces quality cues while aiming to create strong recognition as Every Half grows.

And the brand comes alive well beyond the cup. A 15km trail run staged across Every Half's own coffee farm turns provenance into a high-energy, immersive experience for the fitness community. On the cultural front, Every Half explored coffee raves and became the official coffee partner of A State of Trance in HCMC connecting the brand to music and nightlife.  Each activation is a distinct, ownable entry point that drives trial, relevance, and community —proof that Every Half can make coffee interesting in places its competitors can't reach.

Every Half is riding a powerful structural tailwind. Vietnam's café market is compounding at around 9% a year, and branded chains are growing faster. The five largest café brands lifted their combined share from roughly a third in 2021 to over 40% by late 2023 as consumers migrate from mom and pop and unorganized to trusted brands. Beneath that sits a fast-expanding middle class, projected to grow from around 10 million households today to 17 million by 2030, and a young population, nearly half under 35, that treats the café as a natural place to socialise, work, and relax.

The specialty segment is the sweet spot within this shift. As incomes rise, Vietnamese drinkers are trading up from purely functional coffee toward quality, provenance, and experience, and specialty is one of the fastest-growing pockets of the market. Every Half's "mass premium" positioning, pitched below the global premium players yet unmistakably crafted, sits right in the fairway of that demand.

The smart money sees it too. Highlands Coffee, Vietnam's largest chain, is preparing a domestic IPO; Starbucks has pushed past 150 stores with new Reserve locations. Vietnamese coffee, long shipped abroad by the container-load as a commodity, is finally being valued at home. And there is enormous room to run. Store-gap analysis against the major incumbents shows vast white space in exactly the dense, high-traffic urban clusters Every Half is built to win.

Why We're Doubling Down

Our decision to reinvest in Every Half comes down to a few core convictions.

Every Half is positioned exactly where the growth is and has what it takes to be a country champion. As the category shifts toward specialty and consumers migrate from independents to trusted brands, Every Half's mass-premium position, genuinely crafted coffee at an everyday price, captures the fastest-growing part of the market. Its footprint remains materially under-scaled relative to the incumbents, which means the runway ahead is long and the most attractive white space is exactly where Every Half is strongest.

Second, this is a brand that democratizes specialty coffee — and that is a much bigger prize than premium alone. Plenty of brands can sell expensive coffee to a thin slice of the market. Far harder, and far more valuable, is delivering genuine craft at a price the everyday office worker, student, and family can afford, and making it interesting enough to keep them coming back. That is the platform Every Half has built. A scalable engine that attracts new customers and drives repeat visits through ongoing discovery, across cafés, FMCG products like roasted beans and drip bags, and a fast-growing e-commerce and at-home business.

Third, and most important, we are backing a team that has proven it can execute. Everything we underwrote at our first investment has played out: the stores work, the economics hold, the brand resonates, the awards have come, and the team has strengthened progressively. Founders who have built and scaled coffee businesses before, working together again, with the operational firepower now in place to go national. We have seen this team turn a point of view into a brand. Now, we are backing them to turn that brand into Vietnam's specialty coffee leader.

We could not be more excited to keep building alongside Trúc, Phu, and the entire Every Half team. The category is waking up, the space is enormous, and there are few teams in the region better equipped to seize it. Vietnam's coffee is finally being valued for what it is, and Every Half is making sure the world, and Vietnam itself, finds it interesting.