Grab

Grab is a Southeast Asian technology company that began in 2012 as MyTeksi, a taxi-booking app founded in Kuala Lumpur, and grew into the region's leading "superapp" — offering ride-hailing, food and grocery delivery, payments and financial services across eight countries. Artificial intelligence underpins its marketplace, from driver dispatch and pricing to fraud detection, and since 2025 the company has consolidated that work in an AI Centre of Excellence in Singapore. Grab listed on Nasdaq in 2021 and reported its first full year of net profit for 2025.^[1][2][4]

History

Grab was founded in June 2012 by Anthony Tan and Tan Hooi Ling, Malaysian classmates at Harvard Business School, who launched MyTeksi to make taxi travel safer and more transparent. The company moved its headquarters to Singapore in 2014 and rebranded as Grab, expanding from taxis into private-hire cars, motorcycle taxis, food delivery and digital payments as smartphone adoption swept Southeast Asia. In 2018 it acquired Uber's operations in the region in exchange for a stake in the business, a transaction that regulators scrutinised closely.^[1]

Grab listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in December 2021 through a merger with Altimeter Growth Corp, in what was then the largest United States listing by a Southeast Asian company, with a valuation of about US$40 billion. After years of losses, the group reported its first profitable quarter in early 2025 and its first full year of net profit — approximately US$200 million — for 2025, alongside revenue growth of about 20 per cent.^[1][4]

Artificial intelligence

Machine learning has been central to Grab's marketplace from its early years: algorithms assign drivers and couriers, estimate arrival times and fares, and detect fraud, while the company built its own mapping platform, GrabMaps, rather than relying on external providers. Management said in 2025 that more than 1,000 AI models power the platform, supported by internal systems such as Catwalk for deploying models at scale.^[2][6]

In May 2024, Grab announced a strategic collaboration with OpenAI — the first of its kind for the AI developer in Southeast Asia — to bring generative AI features into its app, and the partners subsequently launched "GO Forward with AI", a programme to equip gig workers across the region with practical AI skills. In May 2025 the company opened an Artificial Intelligence Centre of Excellence at its Singapore headquarters, supported by Digital Industry Singapore, with a mandate that includes building a specialised foundation model trained on Grab's own platform data to better understand the behaviour of users, driver-partners and merchants.^[2][3][7]

Significance

Grab's scale — tens of millions of users across Southeast Asia — makes it one of the region's most consequential testbeds for applied AI, and its blending of AI research with gig-economy operations has placed it at the centre of debates about algorithmic management of work. Its financial turnaround is also watched as a signal of whether superapp economics can support sustained investment in artificial intelligence.^[1][4]

>See Also

• OpenAI
• Ryt Bank
• AI and Employment
• Malaysia AI Startups
• AI in Malaysian Retail