A ride-hailing firm based in Singapore called Grab has raised funds amounting to $1 billion from a clutch of financial firms. These financial firms included global asset manager OppenheimerFunds and China’s Ping An Capital.
Other investors that were a part of the funding round were Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, Macquarie Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. This news has come shortly after Toyota Motor acquired a $1 billion stake in Grab in June as the lead investor in a financing round, followed by Grab’s acquisition of Uber’s operations in Southeast Asia.
“A significant portion of the capital that we’ve raised will go towards Indonesia, which is our largest market. “It’s a sizable market and our investors want us to continue investing,” Ming Maa, the President of the company said.
With these funds, Grab is expecting to move invest in the growth and expansion strategy. The funds will be used to expand its online-to-offline services in Southeast Asia. It plans to use a considerable part to invest in Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s biggest market where Go-Jek is the dominant player in ride-hailing. After Toyota’s investment, the company was valued at just more than $10 billion.
He stated that the company is growing rapidly with the growing demand. However, the company hasn’t begun to decide a date for an initial public offering, despite peers like Uber making such plans. Maa says that IPO is not a short-term objective at this time or something that the company obsesses over.
“We will certainly go public at some point in the future. Short-term, what we are focused on is just out-serving our customers,” he stated. “We are on track to hit $1 billion revenue” in 2018. “We are the first company in this region to hit $1 billion revenue within the technology startup space.”
The six-year-old ride-hailing firm’s existing shareholders include Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp., China’s Didi Chuxing and Uber. That major investors from around the world are providing funds to Grab now may be a signal of growing interest in the region.