Celebrating its seven-year milestone, Grab is looking to continue to grow its reach in Southeast Asia. Aiming to nourish local talent and small companies, Grab hopes to give back through Grab Ventures Velocity, their accelerator program focused on growth-stage startups;and its yearly Misiskolar program, which empowers the wives of its drivers with financial literacy education.
“Grab started out as a small company that merely wanted to address the transport pain point in Southeast Asia. Today, we have grown to be the leading super app in the region thanks to the support given to us by our mentors, financial backers, partners, and customers. Because of this, we have adopted a practice of helping others grow, as Grab continues to expand both in scale and in volume,” Grab Philippines President Brian Cu said.
Grab Philippines President, Brian Cu
Similar to other digital brands, the company has been strategically expanding to being more than just a transportation and logistics solution that it started out as. With it launching GrabFood last year, the company has seen major growth, attributing around 10-12% of their revenue to their food delivery service.
They are also looking to extend their transportation arm into a multi-modal solution. Already launched in Singapore, the Grab app now includes a trip planner, which will tell you what routes and public transportation vehicles to take while commuting as well as estimating arrival time. Additionally, this coming June, the company is set to launch the Grab Bus Marketplace, which allows you to view local bus and ferry routes and purchase tickets all through the Grab App. Grab has also partnered with online hotel booking sites, Agoda and Booking.com, which will be available as a new ‘hotels’ tile on the app. Rounding up their upcoming developments, users can now watch movies on demand while on their daily commute through Grab’s partnership with HOOQ.
Grab has also long entered the Fintech industry with GrabPay—which now supports QR code purchases. While it is not the first (or last) company to develop an e-wallet, Grab has now strategically placed itself in a unique position in the industry—being a hybrid of sorts and bridging the gap between e-commerce, entertainment, and logistics—effectively turning it into a one-stop super app.
