Founders: Nguyen Nguyen, Khoa Pham
Both Nguyen and Khoa come from Vietnam but found themselves at Swinburne University doing AI research. They were quick to gravitate towards each other bonding over their common heritage, maths and AI coursework. Khoa excelled in everything academic but was particularly fond of AI research. Nguyen was deeply fascinated by applied maths before heading down the research path herself. They had spent years together before ever even thinking about starting a business. Nguyen started to carve her own path in entrepreneurship and technology. At the height of COVID-19, she saw a gap in the market in the education sector. Every education centre started closing to the point even schools had to force students out because of quarantine. Parents had no outlet to send their children to educational institutions. Nguyen launched an online peer-to-peer learning platform based in Vietnam, using high-performing Vietnamese graduates to teach the next generation how to excel in the educational system. In just eight months she hit six-figure revenue.
Nguyen spent a few years in the job market recruiting for Antler Vietnam and consulting at BCG Singapore, but building something of her own was always her calling. She started her second startup Plante creating plastic-free gardening materials. The idea of Plante came about from her Arizona high school garden. Arizona is mostly desert, so conserving water and sustainability were large parts of the curriculum. When she returned to Vietnam she found that large crowded cities lacked the ability to produce gardens of the same quality she saw back in Arizona. This journey led her to create a company that uses sustainable materials to eliminate plastic from gardening. Right now Plante is trialling in nurseries across Australia with the aim to replace 2.2 billion plastic pots that go into landfill per year in Australia.
In 2025, while Nguyen and Khoa were running research at Swinburne, Nguyen noticed a new trend in the market: an AI-powered no-code builder via chat interface. She brought on the smartest technical person she knew, Khoa, to tackle the subject matter. Khoa had spent his time refining his AI knowledge conducting AI research for almost four years. At the time, as AI was still developing, there was an understanding it wasn't the right time to do this with the tools they had. So they pivoted to generating interactive product demos instead, eventually pitching their idea at SXSW. The idea had legs but lacked scale and ambition. At a short side-stop at a Google event, they had their first exposure to agentic AI and the term AI Agents.
Khoa and Nguyen saw how agents were running within enterprise systems but had massive red flags in context and security. Khoa witnessed firsthand through his own research at Monash that an AI drug recommendation system recommended a drug to the wrong patient due to incomplete electronic health data. It lacked cultural and biological clues to make the right judgement, because the information wasn't clear enough. An agent can't tell the difference without the right context. It simply does what it's told. Coco stops an AI agent from doing something it shouldn’t, even when a user tells it to.
Raising ambition is a non-negotiable part of Startmate’s Accelerator experience. Coco is aiming to be the protection layer for all agentic payments, banking and lending across the entire world. They're also committed to sharing a portion of profits to set up a social enterprise to help with nature conservation, education and helping others. Khoa and Nguyen's drive to help the world is rooted in family. Khoa's father and Nguyen's mother are both teachers who gave free education to students who couldn't afford it. That’s what dreaming bigger looks like to Khoa and Nguyen: a company that lasts generations, and a world that’s better for it.
