Grab’s $20 billion playbook for becoming a super app

Grab is a rideshare service-turned superapp, not available in the U.S. but rapidly growing in Southeast Asia. It’s even outmaneuvered global players like Uber to reach a valuation north of $20 billion. Grab’s cofounder and CEO Anthony Tan shares how the platform has successfully expanded into food delivery and fintech, while also investing in the future of electric vehicles and autonomous driving. For any leader looking to bolster their company culture to meet the moment, Tan shares how his team set in motion an ambitious project to study and creatively implement AI—channeling both the hunger and humility to win in a competitive and chaotic market.

This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company, Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.

Grab started in 2012 as a rideshare platform. It’s since grown into Southeast Asia’s largest super app, providing food delivery and financial services, and more. The term “super app,” is this an increasingly popular concept? What does super app mean to you?

Well, the super app just means an app that has multiple services. If you look at how it’s evolved here in Southeast Asia, we started just to solve Southeast Asian problems. For example, safety. Safety was a major issue. We wanted to make sure rides were safe for women and children. That was a real problem, and we solved that. We are now at 99.9% safety. And then we said, “Okay, what’s next?” We realized, “Wait, but to get drivers, you needed to lend them a phone.” How do you lend them a phone? Because many of them didn’t even have a smartphone. So we said we’ll start a financing business. So we have fintech built into the Grab app. It was just like one service after another. And then when we [looked at] payments, we said, “Hey, the driver became an ATM, mobile ATM, and it wasn’t safe for them.” So we said, “You know what? Let’s just take cash out of the system.” The drivers have a GrabPay wallet. The customer has a GrabPay wallet. So all this just helped build more and more services on one app.

I was going to ask you about the fintech stuff, because obviously you’re providing a service, but also fintech tends to have better margins than rideshare and delivery, which are tough businesses. How much of the economics was part of the decision where like, “Oh, that’s a gap that is valuable for us to fill”?

The key is two things: One, how do you create amazing data? And two, how do you create an amazing collection? It’s easier to lend money out. The issue is collecting it, right, Bob? So as more and more services are rolled out, every day services are rolled out, more and more data is gathered. As more and more data is gathered, that data has given us an advantage to lend, because we basically create a credit score across hundreds of distinct data points, but it’s that massive data advantage that allows us to price risk much better and to collect much better.

You mentioned that Grab operates in multiple countries. I think eight different countries, if I’ve got it right. I’m not sure how many you’re up to now.

That’s right.

For a lot of businesses that cross borders, 2025 has been a challenging year. I mean, you alluded to it, there’s been geopolitical tensions and economic trade war sparked by the Trump administration. How does all that impact Grab?

Yeah, the geopolitical environment hasn’t been easy. The tariff war hasn’t been easy. When factories have to close down because of the tariffs or whatever shocks that are happening, we are able to cushion all this additional employment. Governments really appreciate it because they’re really concerned when unemployment shoots up. So they see that we’ve been able to drive not just more employment, but within 20 minutes, they can sign up to be a delivery partner, to be a driver. But as we got more supply, actually, prices came down. So if you look at our financials, interestingly, we have more supply, which means less search sessions, which means lower prices, which means more affordability, which means more customers. Yet at the same time, our earnings per online hour keeps going up. So our drivers earn more on a per-hour basis. So really, we are seeing a win-win-win as a counter cyclical platform across all our cities in the region.

I saw that last summer you implemented a company pause for a couple of months to upskill your employees on AI, something you called cyber organization. Why was this necessary at that time? What did it look like?

I think mindset change is tough, especially in an org of over 9,000 people. First, we had to really upskill folks, but shock the system. So we did a generative AI sprint. I spoke to everyone, whether you’re from engineering and data science, you’re an AI specialist, or you are someone just signing up merchants in a tier-three city in Vietnam. We said, “For nine weeks, folks, we’re going to focus on learning and experimenting.” The goal outcome was, every Grabber has to be a technologist regardless of what background you come from.

Before we started the sprint, something like 80% of folks were worried that their jobs would be replaced. But interestingly, by the end of it, 80% were saying they understand generative AI so much better, and they can see how it’s helping their jobs. Total mindset shift. And that’s the beauty. It wasn’t just, “Hey, we just wanted to create a sprint for fun.” We built real generative AI solutions. For example, we created AI Merchant Assistant. Now that’s deployed across millions of long-tail merchants. We worked with the top R&D labs across the world like Anthropic.

Yesterday I was just looking at, we use Claude 4, to think about how to make it so much more empathetic, so much more relevant for the merchants. So now it’s helping them not just boost their sales, helping them with photo edits, helping them position how they look on GrabFood, across the customers, how to pack. They even ask questions, Bob, like, “Oh, business isn’t good. Times are tough. Can you give me some encouragement, please?” And the Merchant Assistant talks in such an empathetic, such an encouraging way, as their personal best friend. So that’s the type of product that couldn’t have come out without this generative AI sprint.

You mentioned that you’re working with Anthropic and Claude, but as I remember, you also worked with OpenAI. You were their first partner in Southeast Asia. Multiple partners is good. I mean, in some ways it would be easier to lean into one system, or not necessarily?

Look, you want to find the best solutions for these real-world challenges. We want to partner the best, and we want to find the best models for specific tasks. When we first started at the early days, I remember we did a change, we did an update on the app. And then there were a bunch of really angry drivers and angry customers who came up to us, scolding us. And we were wondering why. A few of them were visually impaired, and because we did an update, and they couldn’t use the accessibility option. Today we’ve been able to work with OpenAI to create, using multimodal LLMs, on voice specifically, such that they can speak so easily into it, whether you’re totally blind or not, and really solve your problem.

I know you must be thinking, “Hey, look, it’s not a big set of people who are visually impaired.” But you know what, Bob? It helps these individuals in such a real large-scale way, to them individually. As we think about just the visually impaired, we’re thinking about the elderly group, the silver generation. So again, we first started with a large impact for a small group of people. Now, with specialized training, it’s going to larger and larger groups, deployed to more and more geographical markets. There are scenarios we build on our own. There are scenarios we partner with the best, like OpenAI, like Anthropic. There are scenarios where we partner with the best universities around the world, but what we do believe is, generally, partnerships make us stronger.

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