Grab’s Amazonian ambitions

SINGAPORE (June 11): Grab, the ride-hailing platform, is six years old this month, and a far cry from its early days as a taxi booking app created by a pair of Harvard Business School classmates. It is the most valuable start-up in Southeast Asia, a unicorn by any standard, having raised US$4.1 billion ($5.5 billion) in disclosed funding. There have been at least three funding rounds that raised amounts that were undisclosed.

Grab even teaches budding entrepreneurs with a blogpost on its website titled “8 tips to run a successful startup”. This has pointers such as “Grab opportunities” and “If you don’t understand it, you can’t build it”. Now, Grab has launched an innovation arm called Grab Ventures that it will use to seek out other unicorns.