On 1st May 2025, Alterno’s former CEO Kent Nguyen published what looked like a harmless blogpost about the mechanics behind a sand thermal battery. But the daggers were out.
Since then, Nguyen’s posts have turned into way more than geeky 101 explainers. It was the story of an irate, ousted co-founder wrestling for narrative control.
Nguyen, who is based in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, has accused his two former co-founders, Hai Ho and Nam Nguyen (Nam) of deliberately conspiring to push him out of power, leading to his decision to step down as CEO, sell his founder shares, and take up the role of chief scientific officer.
The first two took place, but the latter never happened.
The Vietnamese trio met at Antler, a globally-renowned startup incubator with programmes across Southeast Asia, Europe, the US and more recently the Middle East. They joined the Vietnam cohort in 2023 and formed Alterno, which builds thermal energy storage systems.
Nam was new, but Nguyen and Hai had worked together briefly at Triip.me, a Web 3.0 company where Hai served as chairman for more than 10 years.
Nguyen on the other hand, was a one-time exited co-founder of a product development foundry called Silicon Straits. He sold it to Southeast Asia’s ride-hailing giant Grab in 2016 and was Grab Vietnam’s CTO for a brief period the following year.
Nguyen’s blogposts continued week after week. By the time he got to his eighth tell-all blogpost, the Vietnamese startup community was smelling blood.
On paper, Alterno had raised two rounds – a $1.5 million seed round led by The Radical Fund and Touchstone Partners in April 2024, and then again in May this year, an undisclosed Series A led by UntroD Capital Asia and joined by Antler and ADB Ventures.
But no shares have been issued to the above investors to date, according to Singapore’s Acra records.
Both capital raises are understood to be convertible notes or tranched capital tied to specific KPIs. The only shareholders today are Hai and Nam, who have since picked up Nguyen’s forfeited co-founder shares.
At the heart of this ugly leadership scuffle is Alterno’s sand thermal battery – a piece of technology patented successfully in the United States, with a separate application process in Vietnam still underway. It is also the technology underpinning Alterno’s business.
It is not clear exactly when things began to fall apart at Alterno, but according to Nguyen in his first official interview with media, the relationship between the three was difficult for a long time.
“When I stepped down as CEO on 9 July last year, the idea was that I would be chief scientific officer so I can focus on R&D. The tension between the three of us was already quite bad before that. I knew that I couldn’t continue doing a day-to-day operation at the lab anymore. It was usually just me at the lab. The both of them were not at the lab most of the time,” said Nguyen from Ho Chi Minh City.
“Nam worked remotely from Hanoi. Hai was busy flying around fundraising and entertaining investors. That’s his job. Honestly I didn’t complain that much but the fact that throughout the whole two years of working together, the number of times we actually sat together to even have a meal or a drink was nearly zero. Just a handful of times,” added Nguyen.
When asked why his co-founders would go through so much effort to drive him out of Alterno, Nguyen said it was driven by “jealousy”.
“You see, Hai is the one who focused on fundraising, Nam is the technical guy, so they think that the two of them alone is enough to go on to create a big company…Getting my shares is just part of the outcome, but pushing me out is really the main purpose here,” Nguyen said.
There has been character assassination coming from the opposite side as well.
Hai and Nam declined to be officially interviewed for this story, but they shared a letter addressed to Alterno’s investors where Nam relegated Nguyen’s total contribution in Alterno to zero.
“...the bad leaver mentioned contributing to the Sand Battery business model. In reality, the bad leaver did not contribute to Alterno’s business. His involvement was limited to watching a YouTube video about sand batteries and sharing it with Hai,” wrote Nam, who served as Alterno’s CTO.
“...from research and technology development to supply chain, production, marketing, sales, and fundraising. Unfortunately, I didn’t see the bad leaver, as the CEO, had any significant contribution in any of these areas,” he added.
Antler’s Vietnam head Erik Jonsson and Radical Fund Asia’s founding partner Alina Truhina separately responded to Kristie’s Substack that they are not involved in operational decisions at Alterno.
No response was received by Touchstone Partners, UntroD Capital Asia and ADB Ventures at the time of publishing this story.
Nguyen is threatening lawsuits in Vietnam and Singapore. According to him, his efforts to reach Alterno’s investors have been met with silence.
“This is not a matter of money or shares. I don't want fame. I don't want money. The compensation is an outcome of this, but it's not important to me. The important thing is that I can expose the wrongdoing and the ones who are behind this is Nam and Hai,” said Nguyen.
This is a developing story.