Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

ANTHONY TAN: You can come out as a lion, and be proud and be fierce. You’re willing to chew anything in your path, but at the same time also sort of have the humility of a lamb. It’s like showing love all the time, and caring for your people, while at the same time holding a really high bar, because you love them, because you want them to do better, because you believe that customers expect much more from us. Society wants to see many companies that have triple bottom line fail, so you’ve got to prove to them that a triple bottom line company can not only survive but thrive.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Anthony Tan, CEO of Grab, the Southeast Asian rideshare superapp that’s rapidly growing from Singapore to Vietnam. As Uber expands globally, I wanted to talk to Anthony about how Grab outmaneuvered Uber in Southeast Asia, eventually acquiring its operations in the region. I also wanted to know how Grab has unexpectedly become a pioneer in AI implementation. Anthony talks about how he “shocked” the system at Grab to shift mindsets. Grab may not be a household name in the U.S., but it’s a public company valued at over $20 billion that’s in many ways setting the pace for how rideshare and superapps will evolve globally, from electric vehicles and autonomous driving to interacting with local and national governments. So, let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

[THEME MUSIC]

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Anthony Tan, co-founder and CEO of Grab. Anthony, thanks for being here.

TAN: It’s a real honor.

Copy LinkWhat is a superapp?

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

TAN: Well, the superapp 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% safe. 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 said 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.

SAFIAN: 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?”

TAN: 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.

Copy LinkHow geopolitics has impacted Grab

SAFIAN: 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.

TAN: That’s right.

SAFIAN: 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?

TAN: Yeah, the geopolitical environment hasn’t been easy. The tariff wars 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. 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.

SAFIAN:  It’s been quite a journey. You went public in 2021. I know the stock’s gone up and down in that time. Right now, in what ways is your business at an inflection point? What’s the big urgency that you see now? Is it risk? Is it opportunity? What’s next?

TAN: If you ask me what’s the biggest risk, I would say, look, for us, it’s really about being stagnant. I think we talked about the geopolitical environment. We can weather uncertainty. We can really help communities become resilient. But we need to constantly change. So at Grab, we called it how you think about Kaizen, which is just 1% better every day. For every service, we just need to be 1% better, every trip, every delivery order, every payment. But that’s not enough. That’s just not enough, Bob. We need what we call Kaikaku, which is another Japanese term besides Kaizen. It’s sort of this step change. So we call it GAIkaku, G-A-I, generative AI kaku. Using generative AI to become totally a different company. And that’s what we introduced, this idea of AI-first with heart.

Copy LinkGrab’s 9-week sprint to upskill on AI

SAFIAN: I wanted to ask you about this. 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?

TAN: 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 backgrounds you come from.

Before we started the sprint, something like 80% of folks were worried that their jobs will 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 products that couldn’t have come out without this generative AI sprint.

Copy LinkWhy Grab partners with multiple AI companies

SAFIAN: You mentioned that you’re working with Anthropic and Claude, but as I remember, you also worked with OpenAI. You were like their first partner in Southeast Asia, right?

TAN: Yep.

SAFIAN: So what’s that about? Multiple partners is good. I mean, in some ways it would be easier to lean into one system, or not necessarily?

TAN: 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.

Copy LinkWhy Grab built its own mapping system

SAFIAN:  As you’re talking about partnerships, Uber, which was initially a competitor of yours, Grab ended up acquiring Uber’s Southeast Asia business, I don’t know, six or seven years ago. And Uber took a stake in Grab. Uber CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, he sits on your board. It’s kind of fascinating to go from competitors to sort of allies, right? What is that relationship like? How did you manage to beat Uber, which is something a lot of people are struggling with in other markets? I mean, are there lessons on outmaneuvering other global players?

TAN: Absolutely. How do hyperlocal players like us win? It’s tough, but how do you get problems that no one else can solve? Uber is a huge company. There are many great global tech companies that have huge scale, but they won’t invest in very unique problems. For example, mapping in Southeast Asia, we built our own maps. Our core services are all built on the most accurate maps. We found that third-party maps were just not accurate enough. They weren’t updated. They didn’t understand that most of our mobility fleet are two-wheeled, are motorbikes. That’s why we built GrabMaps. It’s not only provided us a huge competitive advantage, a huge cost advantage, but it’s become now a B2B enterprise service that now Amazon buys from us, Microsoft buys from us. So that’s why we can really understand these local problems, and solving them in a hyperlocal way that leads to a much better service that creates higher loyalty, higher retention.

SAFIAN: I love hearing how Anthony saw something that other big players were missing, and leaned into it, and now has clients like Amazon and Microsoft reliant on him. It’s not unlike his all-in embrace of AI. If Grab is going to go at something, it’s going to go hard. So. How is Grab approaching electric vehicles and autonomous driving, and what makes competing in Asia distinctive from other markets? We’ll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, Grab’s Anthony Tan talked about how the Southeast Asian superapp outmaneuvered Uber and how it’s going all in on AI. Now he shares his strategy on electric vehicles, autonomous driving, and what stands out about Southeast Asia-based businesses, plus lessons on how to cultivate both hunger and humility to build a winning team. Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkExploring autonomous vehicles and EVs

One of the things Grab has been dedicated to is using a lot of electric vehicles, EVs. You’ve partnered with the likes of BYD. In the U.S., a lot of organizations have rolled back sustainability efforts this year. What role does that play in your roadmap looking forward?

TAN: For us it’s two parts. The first part, it is about sustainability, but it’s not sustainability for the sake of sustainability. We have to be honest with ourselves, Bob. Climate change does impact livelihoods. Our drivers, just recently in the Philippines, when there was a massive flood, our drivers couldn’t move. That impacts business. That impacts their lives. That impacts their livelihoods, our lives, and our business metrics dropped in Manila when that happened. So we have to care about the environment. When we think about EVs, we think of it in that light. We need to hit our goal of being carbon-neutral by 2040, and EVs are just part of one of the solutions.

We have invested several hundred millions of dollars in lower emission vehicles that are really primarily on our platform so that we can drive this agenda. Not all markets have EV infrastructure-ready. You want EVs everywhere, but the problem is, a lot of the charging infrastructure just isn’t ready. So we had to partner with governments to make sure that EV infrastructure is strong. We had to work with many companies around to make sure financing is available, not just for the EV cars, but also for EV bikes, motorbikes, but also for PMDs, personal mobility devices. And then, of course, building, as I said, with GrabMaps, we’ve been able to cut travel time, which again reduces carbon. Because of our maps, because of our AI, that is an auto adaptive across our entire system. So for us, honestly, Bob, it is mission-critical, and we have very clear goals, very clear plans to get there.

SAFIAN: I wanted to ask you about also autonomous vehicles, which rideshare companies over here, Uber included, are making a lot of deals around, pretty focused on. You’ve been a little bit more cautious about AVs for your markets.

TAN: It is going to take a longer ramp up time in Southeast Asia. Why? Because the road infrastructure is very different. Outside of Singapore, it is much messier to say the least. It’s much less developed. If you’ve been to Jakarta or Bali or Phuket, it is behind many of the road infrastructures that you’re used to in the West. That’s one. The second is the labor cost. Again, outside of Singapore, much lower labor costs. So for AVs, autonomous vehicles, to take off in the region, it needs not only to be as safe as what you see in the U.S. today, but it needs to be much cheaper. Those price points that you see in the U.S. just can’t work here. It just needs to be much cheaper.

But we are already experimenting. We’ve deployed our autonomous shuttle. We’re partnering with many autonomous vehicle companies across the region, globally for the region, and we are just going to roll out experiments. Many AV companies might not care about drivers. For us, we have to care because drivers make up 99.99% of our business today. So we have to think about not just the displacement effects, but also the augmentation benefits. So we’re really thinking about saying, “Hey, for every driver, how can he become a safer driver? How can they become remote pilots during edge cases? How can we think about them becoming data labelers?” We’ve been upskilling our drivers for a long time, Bob. In the driver app, you’ll see how we’ve partnered MasterCard, how we partnered Microsoft to have our curriculum and micro-learning segments. We think about how to create new jobs as we think about the AV world.

SAFIAN: It sounds like you see plenty of opportunity still in the region that you’re in to not have to look further. I mean, as you say, you’re in eight countries and all these cities, just expanding in those markets is enough right now.

TAN: There’s so many problems to solve in the region, and the region is over 600 million people. It doesn’t have the wealth of America, for sure, but it does have lots of babies. It’s double the size of America in terms of population size. But we literally help reduce unemployment by close to 1% in the Philippines. We generate 0.7% of the GDP of the ASEAN nations, of the big ASEAN nations, right? But the penetration is still low. If you look at mobility, it’s in the low double digits in some markets; in some, single digits. So, do we see huge upside? Tremendously. Our FinTech is our fastest growing vertical, and we are looking at dispersing billions of dollars. We just raised $1.5 billion. It was eight and a half times oversubscribed. We are looking at M&A opportunities, not just locally, but also even globally.

Copy LinkGrab and the Southeast-Asian culture of 4H

SAFIAN: Here in the U.S., there is so much attention paid to China, to China’s economy. From your perspective, is the U.S. too obsessed with China? I mean, what do folks here most misunderstand or underestimate about other Southeast Asian and Asian businesses?

TAN: The reality is, the culture here is one that needs tremendous humility, but tremendous hunger all at the same time. Our leadership culture is based on 4H: of hunger, of humility, of honor, and heart. Hunger, look, we know we just have to outwork everyone because it’s a tougher market. It’s much lower margins. Prices are much lower and just have a much lower cost structure. Second, you just need to be extremely humble. Know that you’re not the smartest guy in the room. In fact, most people are smarter than you, so you’ve just got to take feedback all the time. I get scolded. Just recently, last week I got scolded by drivers, by driver leader groups, to say, “Hey, you’re not doing a good enough job here.” And I love getting that feedback, just tell it to me so I can learn and iterate. And then from there, I called my leaders and said, “Look, these are things we have to change.”

The good news is that because the culture is so prevalent, they can take the feedback and iterate very quickly, then this heart to serve. The culture, you asked me, in those days, and this was pre Dara, with Uber, the culture to work with governments, not fight them head on, but work with them and say, “Look, we’re in this together.” The heart to serve communities, the passion to serve, whether it’s the vision-impaired community, whether it’s the silver generation, helping governments digitize their communities, and just honor that whatever we say, we’re going to do. I can’t talk about American obsession, but I can say I think the culture is one part that has made a lot of our global peers sort of look at Asia and say, “Hey, these are things that we could learn as well.”

Copy LinkInside Anthony Tan’s leadership style

SAFIAN: In the early days of Grab, I understand you put all your money into the business, you’re working 20 hours a day, you’re talking about the hustle there. Has the job gotten any easier? Or is it just different now?

TAN: Bob, my hours haven’t changed 13 and a half years later. I still wake up for this interview at 6:00 AM. I finish work at 11:30. Look, the reality is, it doesn’t change, and I don’t want it to change in the sense of, I still love it.  Every week, my assistant – now I can afford to have an assistant – my assistant really has been able to tell me, “In 26 weeks of the year, you traveled for 25 weeks,” because I need to go to the ground. In the early days, I was by the large monsoon drains that were really smelly, pounding the table, screaming louder than their competitors to make sure we were recruiting drivers, having the local chocolate milk to incentivize them to sign up with us. That hasn’t changed. Last week I was still with drivers, learning from them and getting scolded. Not much has changed.

SAFIAN: You have so much passion about this, and certainly, your expectations are high. Are you hard to work for? I mean, you’re demanding.

TAN: People would say very high intensity. They would say… But I do believe in this concept. I come from a faith that believes that you can come out as a lion, and be proud and be fierce. You are willing to chew anything in your path, but at the same time also sort of have the humility of a lamb. So I always talk about how to be really bold but have tremendous empathy. A lot of times you are wrong, and I’m wrong, and that we are a constant work in progress. So I think it’s like showing love all the time, and caring for your people, while at the same time holding a really high bar, because you love them, because you want them to do better, because you believe that customers expect much more from us. Society wants to see many companies that have triple bottom line fail, so you’ve got to prove to them that a triple bottom line company can not only survive but thrive.

SAFIAN: So, what’s at stake for Grab right now?

TAN: What’s at stake? Lots at stake. We have 13 million drivers and merchants registered on Grab. We are probably one of the largest enablers of jobs. We need to hold ourselves to such a high bar. We must thrive and help them along this journey to really be embraced in an AI-first, in a AV hybrid world. And the best way is to start early, invest in them now, even before AVs are here, and reflect those values in every decision we make every day.

SAFIAN: Well, Anthony, this was great. Thanks so much for doing it and taking the time on an early morning.

TAN: No worries, Bob. For you, anytime.

SAFIAN: When Anthony used the phrase triple bottom line, it struck me how much that concept has gone out of vogue in certain business circles, the idea that a company needs to deliver positive results financially, socially, and environmentally. I’ll be honest that I didn’t expect a ride-sharing app, even a regional superapp, to be quite so focused on succeeding across these multiple goals. But I think it’s a great reminder, especially in 2025, of the responsibility that business leaders have, and the opportunity. 

The irony, as Anthony alludes to, is that what’s good for society and your people, what’s good for the planet and the environment, it’s almost always good for your finances too. Maybe not in the very beginning, but in the long run. So if we want to build a business that stands the test of time, that positively impacts the future, why shouldn’t triple bottom line be a consideration for everyone? My humble thought for the day. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.