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Vu Lam
Founder and CEO · Katalon
Test automation Vietnam
Lam has spent three decades betting that engineering teams in Vietnam can build software products sold worldwide, and Katalon is his biggest test of that idea.
Vu Lam is the founder and chief executive of Katalon, an Atlanta, Georgia, company that makes software for automating tests of web, mobile, API, and desktop applications. He helped build Vietnam’s software outsourcing industry from the mid-1990s and is known for pushing his engineers there to create their own products.
Paragon and the dot-com crash
He came to Vietnam as an American investor in 1995 and founded Paragon Solutions Vietnam, one of the country’s first software outsourcing companies, and during the same years Paragon Solutions India. Paragon raised a large investment in 1999 and planned to go public in June 2000, but the dot-com crash ended that plan, Forbes Vietnam reported. First Consulting Group, a Nasdaq-listed IT services firm, bought Paragon in 2003, and he stayed on as a vice president overseeing First Consulting Group’s development centers in India and Vietnam until Computer Sciences Corporation acquired First Consulting Group in 2007.
KMS Technology and a bet on products
In 2009, during the recession, he and three partners founded KMS Technology, an outsourcing firm whose engineering staff grew from 40 to 100 in its first year and later passed 1,300. He chose Vietnam over India because he trusted Vietnamese engineers’ skills, VietNamNet reported, and he wanted KMS to launch its own products. In 2013 Silicon Valley investors gave him two minutes to pitch QASymphony, a testing company KMS incubated. Four years later it raised $40 million from Insight Venture Partners.
From an internal tool to Katalon
Katalon began in 2015 as Katalon Studio, a tool KMS built for its own testing projects. It was shared with clients, released free to the testing community, and turned into a commercial product in 2019. In 2021 it raised a $27 million Series A from Elephant Partners.
He sees AI as the next big change in testing. “The shift toward AI-powered testing isn’t just accelerating, it’s inevitable,” he told QA Financial, calling quality assurance professionals “the unsung heroes of software innovation.”