In the crowded landscape of AI workflow automation, Diaflow has carved out a distinctive position by prioritizing what enterprise customers care about most: security, compliance, and trust. After years of building custom enterprise software and witnessing firsthand how traditional automation failed to deliver on its promises, founder Jonathan Viet Pham and his co-founders launched Diaflow in September 2023 with a different approach—an AI-native platform that’s both powerful and accessible without coding expertise. 

The results surprised even the founding team: within weeks, the platform ranked number one on Product Hunt and attracted over 10,000 users, with unexpected traction in the competitive US market. In this conversation, Viet discusses how Diaflow differentiates through enterprise-grade compliance standards, the evolution toward a hybrid pricing model, the company’s community-first strategy including free university access, and how Insignia Ventures Partners’ seed investment is accelerating both technological innovation and global expansion into Southeast Asia and beyond.

About Our Guest

Jonathan Viet Pham is the Founder and CEO of Diaflow, an AI-native workflow automation platform that enables businesses to deploy powerful AI agents without extensive coding knowledge. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Viet brings a unique blend of finance and technology expertise to his role. His family developed Vietnam’s first dictionary, which was sold to Apple in 2014, instilling in him an early appreciation for product development. After studying finance at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Switzerland, Viet founded his first global startup in 2017, expanding it to five countries before the COVID-19 pandemic forced a pivot.

From 2020 to 2023, Viet served as Managing Partner at Devtify Technologies, where he led digital transformation consultancy and implementation for over 50 global clients across the Financial Services Industry and Digital Retail sectors in the US and Vietnam. His client portfolio included major brands such as TheFaceShop Vietnam, BeautyBox, Reebok Vietnam, and Techcombank, achieving seven-figure annual revenue. He also founded Artcific, a digital platform connecting artists and galleries that attracted 20,000 daily visitors, and co-founded Calioo Technologies, an online marketplace for bakeries and eateries in Hong Kong.

In September 2023, Viet co-founded Diaflow with his long-time collaborators Lai Pham (Co-founder and CTO) and Anh Doan (Co-founder and CISO), a team that has worked together for over seven years. Under his leadership, Diaflow has achieved significant milestones including ranking number one on Product Hunt, attracting over 10,000 users globally, and securing full compliance with HIPAA Type II, SOC 2 Type I, and GDPR standards. The company raised a seed round led by Insignia Ventures Partners in 2025, positioning it for continued global expansion and technological innovation in the AI workflow automation space.

Directed by Paulo Joquiño

Produced by Paulo Joquiño

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The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, tax, or business advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any Insignia Ventures fund. Any and all opinions shared in this episode are solely personal thoughts and reflections of the guest and the host.

Transcript

The Origin Story: From Finance to Tech Entrepreneurship

Paulo: I think it would be best to start from the very beginning, right? How you co-founded Diaflow with your fellow tech operators. All of you have years of experience combined. And so maybe you can share a little bit of where you were at that point when you started Diaflow considering your previous venture experiences and why you decided to zero in on building an autonomous AI platform to really redefine workflow automation.

Viet: Lai and I, we have been together, I would say for more than seven years already. I still remember the moment that we met was in May 2017. It was at my first startup in Switzerland where I lived and studied before.

I’m a business guy. My background is in finance, even though my family has a tech-based company, so we first developed the first dictionary for Vietnam.

We sold that to Apple in 2014. The product development core is in my heart already, but when I went to university, I decided to study finance instead of technology because when watching my parents running the company, I realized that cash flow and money management are much more important than the product itself because technology changes, right? But there’s one thing that shouldn’t change, which is how you run a business.

I’m really confident with my specialty and I needed to find someone who could take care of the product development and the engineering part of the company for me. So that’s the moment I met Lai.

Building the Founding Team

At that time he was the one building the 4G network in Vietnam with Viettel. One afternoon over coffee I asked him, “Hey, do you wanna do something much more interesting globally?” Because my first startup was global from day one as well. So we started in Switzerland and we expanded to five countries and he said, “Oh yeah, why not? Why don’t we do it?”

So he was the one who took care of the entire backend of the system. And I needed someone who could build the front-facing of the app, the user interface. And at that moment, Lai introduced me to An, who is his friend, and we started together. That’s how we built up a team that has been together for seven years, right? There are highs and lows working together.

The COVID Pivot and the Birth of Diaflow

Then we failed in 2020 when COVID hit. No one was allowed to travel. No one was allowed to deliver food. So the first startup died, right?

Then we co-founded another company. That company mainly focused on delivering custom software for banks or retail companies. And most of the time it was all about automating something in the company. The bigger the company, the bigger the workload that you want to automate, right? Because that is what is going to save you money. You invest money in new software because you want to save money in the long run, right?

We shared the same frustration working with them. You see, we built most of the products as scalable products for enterprise and we realized that it didn’t save them time, it didn’t save them money. They invested a lot of money, but they followed the old mindset which is still buttons and clicks. Nobody wanted to change their behavior to another software, right?

When OpenAI introduced the new interface that people could chat with, we thought, “Hey, why don’t we build software that is fully automated? It doesn’t rely on traditional methods of data input, but it’s a brand new one.” So that’s the reason why we started Diaflow.

What we do is that even though the system is fully autonomous, we allow customers to build the workflow or the AI agents themselves. Luckily the idea was bought by everyone in the founding team and we started founding a new company.

The Challenge of Changing User Behavior

Paulo: What I find interesting is you’re not just serial entrepreneurs, but a serial founding team. Like you’ve stuck together through different businesses. And obviously what led to Diaflow was the pain points, your own pain points, trying to build different kinds of enterprise automation solutions already for your previous startup, so to speak. Because you already had these customers and enterprises that you were working with, did you think it made it a lot easier to introduce this new way of doing things? Or was it actually harder? Because again, as you mentioned, it’s not just about the technology, but it’s also about the behavior, right?

Viet: The biggest moment that we realized was when we finished the product development and we introduced it to the people at that company. The worst moment is that you realize that non-technical users are struggling using the product you built.

Because when you do software outsourcing, you follow the lead of the customer. Sometimes it’s frustrating because you cannot put your idea into the product that you build because the ownership is not yours. And that’s the moment that we saw that we had to start something of our own.

And Diaflow is a product that we own. We design, we study the customer ourselves and we build it up. And if you look at the user interface of Diaflow, it really makes a difference in the market.

Early Traction and Product-Market Fit

Paulo: It has definitely made an impact in the first few months since it launched. It ranked number one on Product Hunt for a bit. And it also achieved over 10,000 users with most of the adoption in the US, which is quite significant considering there are a lot of AI companies coming out of the US. Did it surprise you, this particular growth trajectory and specifically that a lot of it was coming from the US?

Viet: It totally surprised the entire team. We launched on these platforms just to test how the product worked, if there were any bugs, how about the feedback? But then it boomed. Within two weeks after the launch, more than 2,000 users signed up and used it on a daily basis.

It really surprised me that the users over there bought the idea because in our mind, the product should be B2B only, which means those customers would rely heavily on professional services. Which is where we come from, right? We develop software, we build big software. So that’s what was in my mind, until the moment we launched on these platforms—the adoption was crazy.

People bought, people used, people asked questions. And that’s the moment that we were so excited because this is what we were looking for. This is the very early sign of product-market fit, and surprisingly in the US market. Why? And we learned a lot from that.

Why the US Market Resonated

Paulo: What do you think specifically resonated with US users, right? Or even US businesses when it comes to adopting your platform?

Viet: If you look at the big picture right now, most of the AI companies are from the US, right? OpenAI, Google, Gemini, and Anthropic is Canada, but still it’s North America. Since this is where most of the AI hype comes from, people have higher AI familiarity, right? So it increases the willingness to experience new things.

Imagine if you pay for OpenAI, you cannot use other platforms’ advantages. If you use some platform, you cannot use the best of other models, right? So that’s the reason I think US enterprises, US customers have higher AI adoption because of the familiarity.

The second thing is the purchasing power. Like people are quite familiar with paying for subscriptions and spending money, higher income as well. And I think that’s the reason behind everything.

Global Expansion Strategy

Paulo: Given this level of product-market fit with, I guess the US market in particular, how does this affect your view of where Diaflow should expand and drive adoption in the next two to three years? Because obviously if you focus on a different market, maybe the same kind of drivers or the behavior will be different in those markets as well. So how are you thinking about geographical expansion?

Viet: The US will keep leading the market for a couple more years due to the talent penetration, the openness to experience, even from the regulation level. If you deploy AI in Europe, there are a lot of regulations that you have to comply with, right? There are a lot of languages that you have to customize your product to fit with.

You will see the similarity in Southeast Asia. Each country has its own language. Localization is one of the key factors. Now we are starting to see that the US market is getting more saturated. More and more companies will focus more on territories outside of the US, like Southeast Asia. That’s the moment that we see big companies are putting offices in this local area.

I think for the next three years, AI will be everywhere. Not just the US will still be leading the market, but I think we will see more AI adoption and familiarity in other regions in the world.

Differentiation Through Security and Compliance

Paulo: Diaflow wants to follow that increasing adoption globally as well. Obviously, I’m sure this has crossed your mind as you’ve seen a lot of adoption in the US and obviously there’s also a lot of competition there as well. You’ve also thought about how Diaflow differentiates itself from other AI platforms, other agent AI builders for workflow automation? How have you approached that question and how have you developed that differentiation over the months and years since you launched the platform?

Viet: If we chase the features, we are going to lose, right? So what we focus on is the needs of the user. Most of our users are from enterprise or mid-market companies. What they care the most about is data security and compliance. And Diaflow is fully compliant with GDPR, SOC 2, and HIPAA, so that people can use Diaflow in different industries, different segments, and different regions.

That is the thing that Diaflow focuses on the most to differentiate in the market. We don’t chase short-term value, but really want to bring long-term value to our customers.

It’s so hard to get into facilities like healthcare or financial services, but we have a lot of customers from those sectors. The reason is that Diaflow is designed with best practice security on the market. And I think that is something people appreciate the most and we will keep following that principle. No matter how good a product is, it’s obvious, right? We have to comply and understand the needs of the business user.

Balancing Security with Versatility

Paulo: How does this focus on enterprise-grade security impact the way that you approach product development? How do you approach versatility or ensuring that the platform is still able to cater to whatever needs the enterprise might want in terms of what agents they wanna build or for specific workflows? Do you see any kind of conflict between maintaining security and versatility? Or how do you marry the two?

Viet: There is nothing new here because security standards have been published on the market all along, right? So every employee of Diaflow is well trained. When they are onboarded into the company, they have to understand why we follow those security standards. We have all the safeguards needed to protect the customer data inside the company.

That is our culture. We keep repeating that. So when a feature is built or released, it is fully from the heart of the people who build it, right? So that is something that we are really proud of.

Building Trust with Enterprise Customers

Paulo: What other concerns do enterprises have apart from security that are on the top of the list that you guys have been able to address? As you mentioned, you’re not following the features, but you’re following the user needs, right?

Viet: So this is hard. Besides security, what they care the most about, I think it’s about trust, right? Trust is given from the moment they first see the website, when they first start to talk to the salesperson of the company, when we show the demo.

Enterprises really care about those things. That’s the first impression that you can start a relationship with and sell the product. So I think it is all about trust. It’s about honesty. We just sell what we have. We don’t over-promise. In order to pass all those compliance standards, we have to do the same thing internally. That is something people care the most about when they work with Diaflow.

Product Development and Innovation

Paulo: Trust is always a good moat to have, especially with enterprise relationships because these are very big projects and obviously it pays to have that relationship to keep the business going as well for the long term. I wanted to talk a little bit about how you see Diaflow—I know you mentioned you’re not really focused on the features, but obviously you’re seeing how the industry is moving forward. How do you see where the agent AI space is moving impacting the way Diaflow is building out its architecture, enabling capabilities for multiple agents processing, using multiple models? And then obviously, I guess the important part being able to integrate to whatever existing tools or software the business is already using. So how do you see Diaflow continuing to progress in terms of the scope of its capabilities moving forward?

Viet: If you look at Diaflow, it is originally a workflow automation tool. And autonomous, right? So basically what we have been trying to keep up with the market is that we have a lot of AI agents inside our company that serve as eyes for us to keep everything that is new on the market so that everyone in the company is always updated with the latest technologies or latest news about any updates from any company in the world so that Diaflow can know what to do next.

Innovation is a part of our heart. But we only have eight hours per day to work. We have to find a way to work smarter, not harder.

Using Diaflow Internally

Every morning at 7:00 AM, all the AI agents go to different websites, different sources of trustworthy data, get all the summaries and give the team what is the best on the market over there. And give us summaries. Give us the links so everyone waking up before they come into the office, they have something new to share.

For example, yesterday Google just announced a new image model, right? And everyone is hyped about that. So even in our company, at 8 AM, everyone in the company saw the result of that. So that’s how we always keep people up with the latest technology over there, to make sure that we are not left behind, right? So that’s how we leverage even AI in our daily workspace.

Paulo: You’re also obviously using Diaflow to do that.

Viet: Diaflow is the one behind it.

Paulo: Great for you to share that kind of use case even in your own company. Yeah, and I think it is pretty useful because these agents can run 24/7. Even if you have to clock out at the end of the day, they can still continue to run these types of workflows and update you the next day when you get back to work.

Business Model: Hybrid Pricing Strategy

I also wanted to talk about the business model of Diaflow. And we’re seeing this a lot in a lot of AI companies where, you know, a shift from the traditional SaaS kind of seat-based or user-based pricing. But Diaflow uses a credit-based model. What was the decision behind using this type of pricing?

Viet: On a daily basis, we see credit right now as a proxy for compute. So when you run something, it basically sends a message to the server to process and then returns the response to you. And you cannot predict the difference of the message you send to the server and get it back. So credit is a model that allows you to make it flexible. So you don’t have different rule-based calculations. People just pay for what they use. So that’s what’s inside our hand.

But actually Diaflow is also seat-based. Right now the pricing model of Diaflow—in a couple of weeks—is that people will get some free seats with that amount of credits, right? Because we realized that people don’t use all the credit we give them. It’s quite too much. So what we give is that now if they need it, we lower the price so everyone can adopt AI. But if they have more people, they can add more seats. Every seat will come with additional credit amounts. So it’s going to help them more. So a hybrid model.

Paulo: Hybrid model.

Viet: So that is going to help enterprises be flexible with whatever they are going to build. If they don’t have a lot of employees, they pay less. If they have more, they pay more. If they wanna buy a bundle, it’s even cheaper, right? So we wanna bring flexibility to more companies.

Community and Education Initiatives

Paulo: I’ll move on to another topic, which I think is very interesting for Diaflow. And it ties back to what you mentioned earlier of, even though you guys came from enterprise solutions, building software for businesses, you saw early on a lot of, I would say individual user adoption, not necessarily buying it for an entire organization, but maybe just using it for their own workflows at work or even personally. So maybe you can share a little bit about how you think about community. How does this tie back to the enterprise business of Diaflow? How does this ultimately help you guys scale even further?

Viet: We always perceive that community is the center of any business, right? We don’t consider them as fans, but practitioners who love the product, who wanna contribute value to the community, how we can give more than just receive.

Those templates like what the community builds and shares to the world, it’s something to prove that there is something great over there that they have a part of. And people love, right? And that is something we are so proud of when we launched Diaflow Community, where every user around the world can contribute their workflow to Diaflow and be reviewed by our team to be published to more than 10,000 customers worldwide. And that’s something I would say, like even these community members, they are very proud of what they’re doing and we are proud that we have such amazing people doing that.

Free Access for Students

In terms of universities, I still see that most students, they don’t have a lot of budget to pay for AI. What we are trying to do is that we want students to approach AI without any preconceptions. They can use AI for free. Starting from 2026, every student in Vietnam having the domain from the university will have access to all the features of Diaflow. And that is something that we are going to work heavily with other countries in 2026 as well.

Paulo: That’s pretty exciting. It reminds me of being able to use Google Suite as a student back in university and you guys are doing something similar, but for an AI workflow platform. Because I think the interesting thing about a lot of these AI workflow platforms or whatever tools we use, especially for students, it’s accumulated behavior, right? And I guess once they develop an affinity for a certain platform, they might wanna keep using it regardless of whether they’re in university or they enter a new job or something like that, or start their own business.

Looking forward to seeing other initiatives that you have around the region for universities.

Partnership with Insignia and Funding Priorities

In the meantime, I think obviously we’ve—I introduced you earlier as one of our latest portfolio companies. If you guys are watching this, you probably would’ve already seen the news that we have invested in your seed round. And really the focus is on global scale and developing the capabilities of Diaflow even more. So maybe you can share a little bit of background, how you met Insignia, how you met us, and then why you decided to partner with us, and ultimately where you see the funding helping out Diaflow the most.

Viet: I think it’s all about opportunities. You meet someone when you never know if that one would be important in your life. You just have to be nice. You have to share what you can. And this is exactly what happened to Diaflow and Insignia.

So I met Hao, the investment manager at Insignia in Vietnam, on LinkedIn. I sent her a message about, “Hey, we are building something cool. Do you wanna have a look?” And we met in early August 2025.

The Fast-Moving Partnership

And surprisingly, she loved the product. She spent the entire weekend sending me messages about how to build this, how to build that, what is not good about the product, what I should improve to make the product better. And I said, “Okay, interesting. There’s no VC in the region who has asked me those questions because when I met a lot of VCs in the region, what they care the most about is numbers, not the product, not the founder themselves.”

And surprisingly when I met Insignia’s representative in Vietnam, I was like, “Wow, she’s really interested in the product. She can tell me what I’m not doing great.” And I knew that, okay, this is something that I have to follow.

And when the decision was made by Yinglan, it was just one week later. It’s super fast. I didn’t expect that the term sheet was given that fast. And we closed everything within, I think, less than one month. That’s amazing.

And being invested by a tier-one VC in Southeast Asia that has a good portfolio of unicorns and enterprises over there, this actually allows us to expand faster and gives us a stepping stone for the next round. And also the good thing about Insignia that I appreciate the most is that I was allowed to build a workflow for Insignia to use internally. I said, “Okay, cool. Okay. I love it from day one.”

Paulo: You don’t just get an investor, you get a user, a customer.

Viet: Yeah, we got a customer.

Paulo: Quite interesting. You did this pretty fast. You met Hao in August, closed the round in September. How do you see utilizing this additional kind of resource to continue Diaflow’s scale and driving adoption of its platform?

Technology Priorities

Viet: That is something that we planned from day one. From the moment we met, when we raised money, what are we going to use it for, right? The first thing is technology. Everything is moving so fast right now. New technology has been introduced every day from big companies, so we focus on how we can have technologies that we own.

The first thing is proprietary data. What is the data that we gather that can help us build the system that has value in the future? That is the first key, right? So we really focus on bringing our own AI model like the orchestrator that has the capability to coordinate, decompose tasks, and select the models for the right task. So we can call all of them multi-agent orchestration.

That is something that we are following right now and we have our own technology. That is something that we are really proud of. When you use Diaflow, you will see that capability right away. It’s a very early version of our multi-agent architecture, but it’s going to change the way people interact with workflow automation like Diaflow, right?

Integration and Governance

The second goal is to expand our integrations. There are a lot of companies that don’t use any software from other companies. They build it themselves, right? So one of our goals is to expand the integration with those systems and governance capabilities because companies really care about data security, right?

So the more we meet customers, the more demand we have about how they wanna control the data in and out of the system because AI right now, we have to empower them with our own data to let them make decisions or help us make decisions. So we have to control how they use our data. So we really focus on the visibility of data transfer and the decision transparency of the AI. We also focus on audit and performance improvement. So that is the technology priorities with the funding.

Market Expansion

The second priority that we focus on now is market expansion. So as you see, most of our customers are in the US. This is where the highest competition is happening. So we have to find a way to expand our business. And the good thing is the adoption of Diaflow is quite high in Southeast Asia, surprisingly. So that is the priority as well.

Southeast Asia’s Potential and Diaflow’s Vision

Paulo: Quite interesting. I love what you mentioned about governance. I feel like that’s not talked about enough when it comes to AI adoption, data security, and all of that. I feel like that’s a very understated topic. So I think it’s very important that you mentioned that with respect to how you’re seeing Diaflow improve its capabilities. I also think mentioning the whole orchestration model is very important because I think that’s what ultimately will, from at least from a product perspective, really define your product from the rest, right? How efficient it is at really mixing and matching and finding what model works and getting the job done as fast and as accurately as possible.

With regards to expansion, I’m curious to know what you’re seeing differently in Southeast Asia. You did mention there’s a lot of interest in this region. What you’re seeing is different in Southeast Asia in terms of how they adopt platforms like Diaflow. And are there other regions, perhaps aside from the US and Southeast Asia that you are maybe interested in exploring to drive adoption of the platform?

Viet: Southeast Asia, if you look at the population, it has big potential, right? There are a lot of emerging markets here in Southeast Asia and a lot of companies here have to work with international companies.

How can you facilitate when you have the language barrier? And I think this is not a challenge, this is an opportunity.

Because here we have always been chasing the technology from the West. But look at Diaflow. It’s all engineered in Vietnam. It actually has the culture of the Southeast Asian people, but with the international mindset and vision.

I want to prove that the Southeast Asian market, when there are people here who can build such an amazing product, the adoption is high because if we build it, we have to use it, right? And when we first started selling in Singapore, we received a lot of interest. And then this is the first step to make it big from here, right? I hope that I can do that. I have big confidence in this, and I have trust in my team to do that.