Singapore ride-hailing company Grab reportedly is slated to announce an around US$2 billion new financing round, according to a Wall Street Journal story citing people familiar with the matter.
The new round, which includes a previously announced $1 billion fundraising in June from Japan’s Toyota, would value Grab at roughly $11 billion, one of the people told WSJ.
Grab declined to comment when asked by KrASIA.
The new funding comes at a time when Singapore-based Grab, locked horns with its Indonesian archrival Go-Jek, is gearing up to tighten its already firm grip in the region of Southeast Asia in the face of its Indonesian rival’s expansion, in addition to keeping investing in and rolling out a bevy of new products and services, at home and abroad.
Last month, the firm launched GrabPlatform, an open platform that manifests itself in a suite of APIs for 3rd parties to integrate their services with Grab. Grab has evolved from a pure-play ride-hailing contender to provide a wide range of services, including car-hailing, bike and e-scooter sharing, food and groceries delivery, mobile payment, and maybe more, as the company is on its path to turn the Grab app into Southeast Asia’s everyday app.
It’s rival Go-Jek, largely based in home market Indonesia for now, recently kicked off operations in Vietnam as part of its US$500 million expansion plan to bring its services to more SE Asian countries, including Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, as well as Singapore. It’s foreseeable that shortly Grab and Go-Jek would engage in a head-to-head competition in those markets to vie for market share.
Go-Jek, which counts Google, Warburg Pincus and China’s Tencent among its investors, also has grown itself from a ride-hailing tool to an on-demand services platform that offers a long list of services similar to Grab’s offerings.
Bloomberg reported in June that Go-Jek was offered a $1 billion funding by its backers to accelerate its overseas expansion, though at that time Go-Jek, said the same Bloomberg report, hasn’t decided whether to take its backers up on that offer or not.
