Super apps as digital transaction platforms: What Southeast Asia's Grab tells us

Abstract

A compelling facet of the emergence of digital platforms is the phenomenon of “super apps”. This paper looks at the case of Grab, billed as the Southeast Asian super app. Highly significant in its own right, Grab is an exemplary instance of the rise of digital transaction platforms in digital economy and everyday life. In this paper, we look at the evolution of Grab from an app through a platform to its creation as a super app. We argue that Grab seeks to combine various transaction functions within its super app multiverse, ranging from payment services to credit services under-written by escrow funds to public-private partnerships that channel revenue collections and social spending. By such means, Grab has become an essential infrastructure of everyday life for millions across the region and has achieved international prominence, but its profitability and purpose remain fragile. It shows that such digital transaction platforms, in their super app phase, leave open a wide field of possibilities to imagine what these infrastructures might and should look like in the future.

Introduction

The notion of the super app has gained considerable industrial and political capital, as well as increasing scholarly attention, since it first emerged in the 2010s. Over the past decade, the super app has been associated with the smartphone as the point-of-sale interface for social inclusion, urban mobilities, and an increasingly mandatory portal into deeper digital infrastructures. As a matter of design, the super app articulates a symbiotic relationship with the social economies operationalized by digital platforms that utilize social networks as avenues for commerce. This operationalization of mobilities and the marketization of sociabilities converges powerfully, as we shall contend in this paper, in the multiple functions of super apps as transaction platforms.

In the widest sense, transactions signify the codification of relationships through exchange, thereby inferring the deeper social and cultural contexts in which transactions become meaningful, and where the motivations of participants can be properly understood. We see digital transactions as something that links together a wide array of contemporary digital practices, drawing out the interplay of social, economic, and cultural logics in everyday life (Athique and Baulch, 2019). Every transaction is a social action, and thus by our definition, digital transactions are simultaneously:

Acts of Code–a web of informational procedures operationalized via algorithms

Acts of Exchange –a social and economic consequence of the remediation of money

Acts of Communication – a set of symbolic interactions embedded in everyday culture

Acts of Solidarity – a network of social relations and interdependencies between people

Acts of Power – a manifestation of the politics of ownership and control.

Of course, a wide range of social interactions have always been simultaneously economic transactions, whether formal or informal in nature (see Zelizer, 1994). However, the convergence of social communication, information technology, and finance in the era of platforms has significantly expanded and deepened the range, volume, and integration of social and economic transactions.

As market systems, transaction platforms facilitate everyday exchanges in the online economy while simultaneously servicing back end economies in data, influence, energy, and hardware. In some instances, transaction platforms are dedicated to particular functions, such as payment, investment, or the monetization of social presence. In other instances, exemplified by the super app, a suite of digital transactions is integrated within a single platform ecosystem. Consequently, the turbo charging of digital transactions in Asia over the past decade via super apps has come to represent a new phase in the “capability of the mobile phone (and now the smartphone) to colonize everyday life” (Fortunati, 2023, p. 19).

In the bilateral geopolitics of digital technology espoused by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen (Schmidt & Cohen, 2013), among others, super apps have been figured as a Chinese challenge to the dominant architectures of American Big Tech. In this framing, sometimes mirrored by Chinese scholars, the super app presents simultaneously as an infrastructural alternative and a binary choice. In academic research, the prime exemplars of super apps have indisputably been the titans of China's platform economy, such as WeChat and Alipay which have achieved a scale, integration, modularity, complexity, and a degree of compulsion that has become a reference point for other app companies to expand their ambitions (including next generation competitors like ByteDance as well as American social media-cum-app companies such as Meta and X). Nonetheless, it is worth recognizing that the inspiration and rise of China's super apps emerged as part of a wider regional pattern of innovation encompassing LINE in Japan (Steinberg, 2020), Kakao in South Korea (Kim, 2025), and, subsequently, Grab, Gojek, and Jio (Athique and Kumar, 2022) in Southeast Asia and India. Many of the killer functions of the super app (such as QR codes, emojis, and stickers) came from outside of China, whereas the backend software and investment capital driving the super app have been markedly multilateral across the larger region (Steinberg 2019, 2025; Goggin, 2021). As such, it may be more useful to think of super apps as skewing Asian in a broader sense than the nationalist rhetoric of superpower competition typically allows. As part of that corrective, our focus in this article will be the fascinating but relatively under-studied case of Grab, a multinational company centred upon the ambition of becoming “Southeast Asia's leading super app” (Grab, 2025).

In taking this approach, we still need to recognize a central contribution of China's iteration of the super app: the absolute centrality of digital transactions to the utility and design of platform ecosystems. Integrating in-house payment gateways for eCommerce from the outset is what enabled China's digital platforms to overcome the infrastructural limitations of China's state-owned banking system and the lack of central clearing services (such as Visa) to enable the rapid expansion of peer-to-peer payment. These capabilities allowed smartphone-based commerce to grow very rapidly, allowing an early integration of personal finance with social media, and a rapid switchover to mostly digital in-person payments. The consequent emergence of Alipay and WeChat Pay as the predominant actors in retail finance created a new financial architecture for the domestic economy, as well as a vital logistical component of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (Keane et al., 2020). This macro-economic rebalancing represented a much greater ambition than the UN-mandated use of mobile apps to deliver cashless payments and micro loans to the global South. The sheer scale of super apps with nigh on a billion users had profound implications for China's domestic finances, especially as they expanded into consumer credit. By 2021, this aggregation and platformization of “shadow banking” prompted state intervention in the form of regulation and divestment, even as the super apps were encouraged to expand internationally (Langley &Leyshon, 2025). Taking their lessons from the Chinese experience, other Asian countries calibrated their own approaches to the appification, platformization, and financialization of their mobile internets.

In this respect, we recognize that the Asian super app model is also a consequence of a condensed development trajectory. Whereas the market layers of the US-dominated digital economy were built up consecutively across the eras of institutional, desktop and mobile internets, Asia's mobile intensive digital economies emerged in a much shorter time span. This compressed development itself provided for greater integration of functions, but it also gave super apps the opportunity to build integrated systems without the prior existence of hegemonic interests or regulatory barriers delineating the communication, distribution, and transactional layers of the Internet economy. The super app can thus be seen as symptomatic of a “full stack” approach, which served as a starting point in China, but has since been emulated as an international business model (see Jia et al., 2022). This notion relates explicitly to the staged constitution of super platforms as private marketplaces with their own internal financial infrastructure. McKinsey characterizes this as a process of development from “thin” to “partial” and “full” stacks, with each stage advancing towards the realization of embedded finance (Dresner et al., 2022).

Appification—the “thin” stack where the digital interface is inserted into an existing set of (often informal) market relationships, the platform operates as a market intermediary, and a rapid growth model is driven by venture capital.

Platformization—the “partial” stack where platform ecosystems enclose peer-to-peer exchanges within a proprietary model, the platform becomes the market operator, and expansion is funded by the interest on the float of monies gained from providing an escrow service between buyer and sellers on-platform.

Financialization—the “full” stack, where the platform leverages the balance of platform credits to provide financial products to its customers and workers, the platform becomes its own bank, and the value of its turnover of capital and customer debt is realized through a public listing.

In this staged financialization process, the role of the platform as a temporary custodian of other people's money is the key source of liquidity, with the “escrow pool” of in between money providing profits for the platform via interest and/or leverage. Thus, the turnover of transactions via the platform (as ostensibly a third party mediator) is key to its valorization in the final stage. What is presented by McKinsey as a pathway to platform finance also corresponds to the thickening of digital architecture and the expansion of the app. Thus, we can also think of these three stages in terms of the evolution from app through platform to super app.

Unlike some super apps that have clear antecedents in desktop or pre-smartphone eras, Grab's origin could be characterized as “mobile native”, with its development embedded in the smartphone ecosystem. For instance, smartphones have offered an evolving range of payment modalities including SMS, QR code, Near Field Communication (NFC), and digital wallets. They rely upon an array of multiple technologies anchored by cellular networks, able to operate in concert with financial systems linked via the Internet. Smartphones thereby integrate multiple layers of network connections, data “on device”, data held in repositories, “in the cloud”, and processed by financial networks, data analytics, platform algorithms, machine haptics and sensors, and an array of messaging systems. The smartphone as a payment tool both necessitates and supports the most visible technologies of cybersecurity and identification: touch, facial, and biometric recognition, backed increasingly by automated decision making and AI.

With this parallel stacking of technologies and finance in mind, this paper provides a critical analysis of Grab's origins, development, and dynamics––how it began as an app, reconstructed itself as a platform brand and what it now looks like as a multinational super app and digibank. We aim to identify what the case of Grab––intriguingly framed by its simultaneously national, regional, and global context––tells us for understanding: (a) global digital platform ecologies and the role that mobile-first trajectories play in these; (b) the contribution of super apps to financial, social and political transactions in everyday life; (c) global media formations and governance (Athique and Baulch, 2019; Steinberg, 2019; Van der Vlist et al., 2024).

Our account is divided into four main sections. First, we discuss the concept of the super app and its implications. Second, we look at Grab in its appification stage, and how “formatting” of Grab evolved from its initial base in urban mobility. Third, we consider the reinvention of Grab as a platform predicated upon the pursuit of financial inclusion as it diversified (Grab, 2023, p.31). We interrogate the shaping of Grab's values and brand identity as “The Grab Way”, as the platform came to imagine itself as a “A Force for Good in Southeast Asia”. Fourth, we dissect the acme of Grab as a global corporation, its interlocking monetization strategies and how the maximization of transaction chains is baked into its ecosystem. Here, we argue that Grab seeks to combine various transaction functions within its super app multiverse, ranging from payment services to credit services to public-private partnerships that channel revenue collections and social spending. By such means, Grab has become an essential infrastructure of everyday life for millions across the region but nonetheless the firm remains surprisingly fragile in terms of profit margins. Like many other super apps and digital platforms primed by venture capital, it has struggled to find a long-term sustainable business model in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic (Haslam, 2013; Nowak, 2023; Saha, 2022). By redirecting efforts toward financialization, the promise of utility that underpins the layering of services, functions, and affordances in a “full stack” inevitably draws super apps like Grab into the heart of contemporary articulations of citizenship, social, and political development. Thus, we conclude with reflections on what Grab tells us about the age of digital transactions that the super app encapsulates.

What was the super app?

The term “super app” has been used since at least the mid-1990s to signify a versatile and impressive application (Goggin, 2021). Circa 2019, the usage of the word super apps changed, especially in financial, technology, and lifestyle media to connote the sense in an app might corral a user's attention, engagement, and value. There was a certain fascination in evolving super apps in emerging markets how these compared to, challenged, and offered lessons for dominant competitors, especially in North America, at this inflection point. What featured in these discourses was a sense of wonder and envy at the Asian success in cultivating super apps that threaten to sweep all competitors before them (McGee, 2019). Initially, commentators and business folk alike were fascinated by East Asian super apps such as WeChat/Weixin in China and Line and Kakao Talk in Japan and Korea. Quickly attention moved to the rise of such super apps in and nascent to the Southeast Asia region, in particular Indonesia's Gojek and Grab (Ruehl & Kynge, 2019).

To put the concept of super app on firm conceptual foundations, we can turn to the significant scholarship conceptualizing and locating super apps in broader digital and social contexts. Super apps bring together different things and possibilities for interlinked actors wishing to transact, as Steinberg et al. note: “Super apps are super due to their ability to weave together functionalities and affordances, from music to ride hailing to money” (Steinberg et al., 2022). In the discourses and scholarly literature on apps, one important theme is about apps as providing a mechanism of “value co-creation”, blurring the line between the firm and the customer (Stocchi et al., 2022). In terms of the evolution of apps, the super app provides an important way for large firms to master the complexity of apps and platform ecosystems, including considerations of tying a user to its own platform versus “multihoming” (Chen et al., 2022). This multihoming makes apps available, interoperable, and functioning across different app systems, stores, devices, and software environments. These dynamics marshall technologies and business strategies across an assemblage of contexts and app platforms are the backstage, enabling infrastructure to underpin ongoing service delivery and competitive efforts by firms.

Like other apps, super apps are also tied to smartphones and adopt, incorporate, or ventriloquize their capacities (Steinberg et al., 2022). The layering of services, functions, and affordances has seen technologies dubbed “super apps” as they seek to extend their reach as digital platforms. Into the heart of contemporary transactions, cultures, and social relations, super apps seek to achieve an essential, utility-like character, with compulsory enlistment for consumers, users, and suppliers. Indeed on the cusp of the emergence of super app as a term, Julie Yujie Chen & Jack Qiu offered an account of the re-occurring concept of “digital utility”, with an analysis of Chinese gig economy company DiDi Chuxing, as something that seeks to capture the evolution of new interplay and boundaries between public and private services, formal and informal economies, and their kinds of labour (Chen, J. Y. & Qiu, 2019). Super apps can be seen as a species of digital platform that have emerged part of the wider, complex regional and global evolution of mobile media and communications and apps, in the path out of the COVID-19 pandemic. To understand how super apps come to be, an important starting point lies in the insight that “media power in this digital conjuncture operates as much through national and regional differences” (Steinberg et al., 2022). Van der Vlist et al. have fleshed this out with a discussion of “super-appification” that offers a “typology that delineates the geographical contours and characteristic features of the super app”, based on analysis of 41 super-apps (2024, p. 3). Crucially, they see a crucial role for what they call “super-app constellations”, as a framework for “conglomeration dynamics that drive super-appification” and the “integration of highly modular systems & services in the global digital economy” (van der Vlist et al., 2024, p. 20). As Athique and Kumar (2022) note, super apps are designed to capture consumer markets by tailoring their interface to suit local tastes and preferences (via user content creation and localized services), while reshaping the envelope of social communication to support the extraction of profit from peer-to-peer exchanges. The super app is simultaneously the retail footprint of the business ecosystem and the information layer of the technical ecosystem. The super app is also where users experience on-screen what Ishita Tiwary has called the “ecospheres” of the platform economy, which we could define as a branded and mutually reinforcing assemblage of products, services and content offerings that deploys mobile affordances and algorithms to optimize information, consumption and behaviour (2020). Invariably, at the heart of super platform ecosystems and super app affordances is a transaction platform that operates as a clearing house for many-to-many exchanges across multiple markets. For example, Alibaba's proffered “way of life” ecosystem is explicitly organized around the central node of Alipay. Transactions are invariably the core interest of the business ecosystem, the central function of the technical ecosystem and the enabling affordance of the app.

The effect of these recursive, cumulative, vast layering of technologies is the peculiar accomplishment of the super app as abiding habitation in society, as Steinberg et al. propose: “The super app is one form in which these monopolies are experienced as a vernacular, everyday infrastructure; a condition for life ….” (Steinberg et al., 2022). This dispensation of super apps seeks to take the mobile phone beyond its character and is conceptualized by mobiles scholar Rich Ling as “taken-for-grantedness” (Ling, 2012). Just as a failure or outage of a mobile network, loss, breakage, or multi-function of a phone can have dire ramifications for users and the business of everyday life, so too can a disruption in the smooth running of a super app––an example of which is the extended outrage of Kakao Talk in October 2022 (Hefley et al., 2024).

In our articulation of transaction platforms (this issue) as a set of exchange nodes that underpin the internet as a transactional architecture, we have canvassed six classes of transaction platforms: Payment platforms (facilitating monetary exchange across a range of digital currencies), Banking platforms (embedding individuated credit regimes), Exchange platforms (enabling financial trading), Escrow platforms (that pool P2P transactions as ‘in between’ money), Social platforms (that marketize sociability and channel social economies), and Citizenship platforms (that govern public sector transactions). Each class of transaction platforms provides functions necessary to platform economy as a whole. Rather than being singular branded businesses in isolation, transaction platforms operate as modular components of mobile Internets as larger transactional architectures. For their part, super apps commonly seek to combine multiple transactional modules within their overall configuration. TikTok, for example, combines payment, social media, and escrow functions in its admixture of entertainment, influence, and e-commerce. GCash, the Philippines mobile payments and finance super app, combines payment, banking, and escrow models in its virtualization of the cash economy but, like Grab, it also foregrounds its social and civic participation initiatives. Grab's competitor in Indonesia, Gojek, does this too while also channelling escrow profits into lending, integrating mobile wallets and payments for users, partners and merchants, collecting revenues for private and public sectors, and providing financial logistics for online retail, including for TikTok. Thus, even without formal integration, transaction platforms operate in tandem through the execution of formal or informal transaction chains (multi-stage transactions across platforms) (see special issue introduction). Through their financialization strategies, super apps seek to combine retail applications of these functions because the aggregation of transactions naturally infers the possibilities for expansion and leverage, and the completion of transaction chains on-platform keeps money in their business.

The research to date on super apps, especially the recent theoretical and empirical advances outlined above provide a context for our discussion of the emergence of Grab––and the larger regional questions of why, how, by whom, for whom, and what, do super apps emerge in Southeast Asia and globally? Thus, our interest lies in the “making” or “formatting” as Steinberg puts it, of Grab as a viable large-scale business, then digital platform, and in particular how its assembling as a “super app”; and how the emergence of Grab as a dominant “Southeast Asian super app” happened in tandem with the making of a market in which mobile technology in its app phase plays a decisive role. So, we wish to understand in what sense Grab is transforming something existing (such as products, contents, or services) and creating new forms, opening up new markets where these are sold or exchanged, or transforming subjectivities of subjects (producer, consumer; Steinberg, 2020, p. 2).

Accordingly, our framework also draws on Steinberg's earlier work on LINE and Asian platforms (Steinberg, 2019) as well as his later notion of “paraplatforms” (Steinberg, 2024). We also draw on other work on the histories of specific super apps and platforms, such as WeChat (Chen, J. Y. et al., 2018) and WhatsApp, with its substantial Southeast Asian take-up in various countries and intra-regionally as well as mediating the region to broader global flows (Johns et al., 2024). Such work fits into a body of work on global and regional geographies and histories of digital platforms, mobile technologies and apps (Goggin and McLelland, 2017; Brügger et al., 2018). The methods in this paper are drawn from political economy, cultural economy, and global media policy research and approaches (Goggin, 2011; Padovani et al., 2024; Steinberg, 2020, 2025). The research base for this paper is information, documentation, and representation available publicly on Grab in English. Key sources have been: coverage by leading global press and mainstream press in Southeast Asia region available in English, especially Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, as well as Vietnam and the Philippines; coverage, commentary, and analysis in a range of influential technology and financial blogs and websites; publicly available communication by MyTeksi, Grab and partners, especially videos on various social media platforms and websites; MyTeksi and Grab legal, regulatory, and corporate governance documents and filings (including after Uber's listing on the US Nasdaq in December 2021); documents and analysis available via regulatory hearings, such as the Competition & Consumer Commission of Singapore (CCCS), Malaysia Competition Commission (MyCC), and Philippine Competition Commission (PCC) communications, hearings, and decision in the Grab-Uber merger proceedings over 2018–2023; as well as other documents from other regulatory considerations of Grab's activities in Southeast Asia.

We would note that the paper is part of a larger project on digital transaction platforms in Asia that seeks to integrate these conceptualization and analysis of the economies with an understanding of everyday practices and the social relations and cultural dynamics in which these are embedded (Athique, 2020, 2026). This suite of work also features ethnographic studies that offer perspectives on Grab's labour practices (in Vietnam and the Philippines), small business (in Malaysia), use, and affordances (in Indonesia)—fleshing out the picture of how Grab has been composed and embedded in a range of different societies, cultures, and locations across Southeast Asia (Athique and Lorenzana, 2026; Nguyen-Thu and Munn, 2025). Thus, we are mindful of the significant interplay between a super app and its users as a core part of the social shaping of digital transactions in a material setting.

Appifying Grab

Grab's origin was in a start-up company called MyTeksi, launched in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 2011 by young Malaysian entrepreneurs Anthony Tan Ping Yeo, Tan Hooi Ling, and Adeline Chan. A recital in many articles in the financial and general press (e.g. Soon, 2022), the story goes that MyTeksi was an idea pitched by the trio while they were studying at Harvard Business School, as part of its Annual Business Plan contest—winning a runner-up prize.

MyTeksi. Malaysian taxis, or “teksis,” are a traveler's nightmare: wait times are long, customer service is poor, and passengers are frequently mugged or even killed. Harvard Business School (HBS) students Anthony Tan, Hooi Ling Tan, and Adeline Chan want to bring mobile technology to the growing industry that would match drivers and riders, enable mobile tracking, and allow customers to rate their service. (Harvard Gazette, 2011)

MyTeksi was launched in Kuala Lumpur in June 2012 by the chairman of the Land Public Transport Communication, counting on the support of leading provider Comfort Taxi. With the tagline ‘MyTeksi so Seksi’ (MyTeksi, 2012), the ride hailing service had a focus on ease of booking and quick dispatch of taxis as one of its virtues as well as other features (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

MyTeksi web page, 2013. (Source: Wayback Machine, Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20131128041547/http://grabtaxi.com/).

MyTeksi faced one major competitor, TaxiMonger, a home-grown app that launched by tech business entrepreneurs in February 2012. By 2013, there were two apps launched by taxi companies, as well as Easy Taxi–– a start-up backed by the global firm Rocket Internet.

In this early period, MyTeksi's role in helping the passenger find rides more easily was promoted as a way to experience greater safety and security (for instance, via its “Share My Ride” function), something that consumers clearly took up. General Manager, Adelene Foo, for instance, wrote a letter to the New Straits Times conveying the “deepest sympathies” of MyTeksi to “the victim who had to go through such a traumatic experience”, of nearly being abducted from a taxi. Foo detailed the features of MyTeksi that can “ensure greater security” for all Malaysians “for their taxi rides” (Foo, 2013). As well as offering a better, safer service for passengers, MyTeksi promoted its product as something beneficial for taxidrivers. The mood soured when MyTeksi moved away from the traditional taxi industry to embracing drivers who would use their own vehicles––especially when it rebadged as Grab.

MyTeksi's change of strategy was driven in large part by the entry of Uber into the Malaysian market. GrabTaxi was the brand used initially by MyTeksi to expand into other country markets in Southeast Asia––the Philippines in August 2013, moving to Thailand and Singapore in October 2013, with Indonesia following in November 2013. MyTeksi quickly became a darling of the financial press and digital tech start-up scene, especially as an example of “going regional” (Wong, 2014). At this stage, GrabTaxi was still positioned as a third-party app for existing tax-drivers, something that was about to change. Uber had its “soft-launch” in October 2013, only offering its Uber Black premium services. Whereas MyTeksi relied in the existing taxi fleet, Uber used privately-owned vehicles––the legality of which was unclear at the time. Uber proceeded to launch its UberX services in August 2014 in Kuala Lumpur (eventually followed by five other cities by late 2016). In establishing its service, Uber Malaysia faced significant protests by local taxi associations as well as some incidents of vigilantism (Malay Mail, 2015). In 2014 MyTeksi launched GrabCar, as a premium service, in Kuala Lumpur, Manila, and then in Singapore.

Reform of the much-criticized taxi industry had been in the wings for some years, with MyTeksi and competitors being embraced by some stakeholders in government, regulation, and business as agents of change. For its part, the taxi industry called on the government to regulate GrabCar and Uber and the burgeoning ride-hailing industry. The government's response was the Taxi Industry Transformation Program (TITP), announced by the Land Public Transport Commission in August 2016, with legislation following in 2017, to clarify the legal status of emerging ride-hailing services, and create a licensing and regulatory framework––giving some advantages to existing taxi drivers and encouraging new entrants to compete with the Uber and GrabCar.

The shift in 2014–2015in MyTeksi moving away from taxis to embracing private car drivers and motorcyclists coincided with its rapid customer growth and expansion across Southeast Asia. What underpinned this was major investment, something critical to most ambitious super apps and digital platforms. From its inception, Grab was able to count on significant support and investment from governments and especially from major investors. The first significant support was from a Malaysian government innovation fund, Cradle Fund, supporting early-stage innovation, which gave MyTeksi 150,000 RM (Ringgit Malaysia) in 2012. However, Grab's founders felt that Malaysia could not provide the next-stage funding or ecosystem needed to grow the company (Leow & Lau, 2024, p. 85), so it moved its corporate headquarters in 2014 to Singapore (Brail, 2022). Here Grab attracted strong, ongoing support from the Singapore government and its related corporations and entities. This was kicked off in April 2014 when Vertex Venture Holdings provided an undisclosed amount (suggested to be more than US$10 million). Vertex Venture is owned by Singapore government Temasek and was then the largest state-owned venture fund in Southeast Asia. The following month, Vertex contributed to an additional US$15 million in Series B funding, led by Silicon-Valley and Shanghai-based GGV Capital, with buy-in also from Qunar (owned by Chinese search engine giant Baidu). GGV Capital's Managing Partner, Jixun Foo, enthusiastically joined GrabTaxi's board: “we believe that GrabTaxi for Southeast Asia and Didi for China will be the go-to transport app in their regional markets” (Jixun Foo, quoted in Shu, 2014). Over the next few years, Foo played an important supporting role, very interestingly portrayed in the 2022 “ride along” video (GGV Capital, 2022) in which he joined Tan in one of his signature day stints doing Grab deliveries around Singapore, discussing the evolution of Grab (Figure 2) (GGV Capital, 2022). The figure of Tan, prominent among a select group of co-founders, board members, and investors, in curating an “entrepreneurial digital identity” (Block et al., 2024) for Grab, building on MyTeksi, has been critical––as many similar videos, social media posts, corporate initiatives, and media appearances bear out.

Figure 2.

“GGV's managing partner Jixun Foo joining Grab's CEO and co-founder Anthony Tan on a GrabFood delivery”(Source: GGV Capital, 2022).

In January 2016, all services were rebranded to Grab: taxis (GrabTaxi), private car services (GrabCar), motorcycle taxis (GrabBike), “social” carpooling (GrabHitch), and “last mile” delivery (GrabExpress), with the company boasting that the “rebrand signifies Grab's market dominance in Southeast Asia” (Grab, 2016). CEO Tan underline Grab's expanding role as a transport provider: “we’re now much more than a taxi app … Grab aims to make transportation accessible to everyone in Southeast Asia” (Anthony Tan, quoted in Grab, 2016). From its new perch in the regional crossroads of Singapore, Grab expands from its base in urban mobility and delivery into the new markets, everyday habits, and technologies of money and finance.

The digital transaction platform

The next decade of Grab's financialization turn sees a dizzying expansion characterized by successive rounds of investment from leading Asia and global companies. (Start-up funding includes pre-seed and seed funding, then progressive larger tranches of funding as a fledging firm advances from Series A through to Series H funding rounds; Wright and Robbie (2022)). In an expansionary phase, Chinese ride-hailing behemoth DiDi Chuxing (Ko, 2019) was an early investor in Grab, then continued to invest, not least as it parried Uber's competitive designs in its home market (Yunhan & Dohoon, 2022).

As part of its strategy to target consumers in the emerging markets of Asia, consumer credit company Experian invested an undisclosed amount in Grab's 2019 financing round and partnered with Grab(Experian, 2019). This kind of investment underscored a new pathway: as Grab grew and sought to best its main rival Uber, key was its strategy to grow digital payments as the end game. GrabPay started as a way for customers to buy and store credits to purchase rides and later to transfer with other users. It then added mobile payments to merchants in retail, entertainment and food and beverage via QR, as well as a peer-to-peer transfers to other users via their mobile phone number or QR—an e-payment initiative rolled out first in Singapore, where a system for QR payments and consumer acceptance were already established (Goggin and Wilken, 2024) and Singapore was keen to emulate the lead of China and its firms such as Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent to become a “cashless society” (Cheok, 2017). In 2017, Grab acquired Indonesian e-commerce start-up Kudo, leveraging its network of reportedly over 400,000 agents and integrating its payment systems with GrabPay, as part of its effort to “acquire users” in the populous rural areas of the archipelago.

We can see in these developments the reinvention of Grab from its initial base in urban mobility to platform, among a range of other things, devoted to financial inclusion, As foreshadowed, this direction is bound up with the vital ethos for the creation of Grab—how it was imagined in terms of its identities, values, and brand (Roscoe, 2022; Geiger et al., 2024). The Grab philosophy is called “The Grab Way”, articulated by Anthony Tan with co-founder Tan Hooi Ling. While Anthony Tan has been the face of Grab, others have figured also, moving in and out of the picture. Notably, Tan Hooi Ling has remained as an official co-founder. (She stepped down from official Grab positions at the end of 2023, remaining in an advisory role.) In a letter included in the filing documents for the momentous IPO filing, the co-founders outline the Grab Way:

Why did we start Grab? … businesses can create double bottom lines—i.e., deliver profits and social impact at the same time—and sparked a dream of building a company that would be a force for good for Southeast Asia (SEA), the place we call home. (Tan & Tan, 2020, p. 1)

Tan Hooi Ling explains how she joined forces with Anthony Tan—“him from automative industry and me from terrible experiences taking taxi”, with a shared interest in building “sustainable businesses” to service those at the “bottom of the pyramid”, so “we could ride the mobile technology wave” (Goldman Sachs, 2019).

In their letter on the Grab Way, the co-founder described how, as well as meeting the need for safety, in the process they witnessed the unmet need and untapped potential of “everyday entrepreneurs”:

As we equipped them with smartphones (for many of them, their first), brought them online with data plans, and served them a platform that made their job safer and more efficient, their response was tremendous … When we opened our eyes to see them, everyday entrepreneurs were all around. They are the tuk tuk driver in Phnom Penh, the wet market fishmonger, and the Chinatown chicken rice seller we’ve known for the past 20 years. (Tan & Tan, 2020, p. 1)

In its evolution of its vision to be a “force for good” Grab's leaders have at time described the company as a “social enterprise”, initially as a “good guardian of the platform [for] drivers and passengers” (Start-Up, 2013). In terms of an ethical vision for Grab's management team, the Grab Way, and various other representations, point to the importance of leadership principles such as “servant leadership” (GGV Capital, 2022). Not surprisingly, from its inception as MyTeksi, Grab has launched a roster of charity and good corporate citizen initiatives funding scholars, contribution to sustainability measures, and so on. This includes a range of initiatives to acknowledge, publicize, and reward the hard work of its drivers, such as its “Driver Swap” campaign or its 2015 “Good Surprise Taxi” initiative in Ramadan (MyTeksi, 2015).

One of the most interesting areas here is the prominence of disability as key to Grab's presentation of itself as “for good”. Grab has long highlighted its commitment to advancing disability inclusive and accessible services and work inclusion. Sometimes this has been presented in stereotypical, even ableist terms such as the publicity devoted to the story of “Grab's First Blind Coder”, a young Vietnamese man Nguyen Hoang Giang, who ended up working as a programmer in Grab's Singapore headquarters (CAN, 2017; Xuan, 2018). This representation of Blindness is reminiscent of the positive stereotyping of people with vision impairments critiqued almost 20 years ago by disability scholar David Bolt, who argued that it amounted to a notion of “beneficial blindness” that upholds the “binary logic of ‘the blind’ and ‘the sighted’, them and us” (Bolt, 2006). Fair to say that this is the representation in media coverage of Nguyen rather than Grab's doing, but Grab's enlistment of disability, and what Mauksch has called “selective inclusion of individuals based on stereotyped qualities associated with their bodily condition” (Mauksch, 2023) in its creation of the Grab brand does raise some troubling questions.

In 2019, Grab launched its “Grab for Good” social impact program to “improve digital inclusion and digital literacy in Southeast Asia”, empower “micro-entrepreneurs and small businesses” and “building future-ready workforces” (with a flagship initiative with Microsoft) (Grab, 2019). A signature feature of the launch was its “Break the Silence” initiative to “create more opportunities for the deaf and hearing-impaired across the region” (Grab, 2019), started in Malaysia and Thailand, where Grab claimed over 500 “deaf driver-partners on the platform” (Grab, 2019), now to be expanded to Indonesia and Singapore. Grab also announced the extension of its GrabGerak, “a transport service dedicated to passengers with disabilities” in two more Indonesian cities (Grab, 2019), as part of its continuing effort to make its services more accessible.

In the many iterations of the Grab Way, a key thing that comes through is the way that Grab's origin myth locates the company in a specific locality with its distinctive geographies, cultures, industries, and experiences. As Grab develops, this develops into the core brand value and identify of being “hyperlocal”, allowing the burgeoning app to accent its focus on the requirements, culture, and contexts of specific city and country markets as well as making a claim for its regional identity and coordinates (Grab, 2023, p. 12). In its report, as an overall group (Grab Holdings) and via each country subsidiary, Grab coordinates detailed initiatives for well-publicized investments and partnerships in developing infrastructures, digital assets and capabilities, and the digital economy in each of the countries in which it operates (Grab, 2023). It is a central ambition of Grab to respond to “local consumer culture” (Cheah, Krajčík & Koay, 2024, p. 1379). A good example of Grab's efforts to show it understands local culture is its #GrabBayanihan” communication and promotional strategy. “Bayanihan” is the Filipino ideal for community assistance and helping one another that Soriano et al. have discerned in digital labour strategies of influence and survival (Soriano et al., 2021). #GrabBayanihan emerged as a key amelioratory strategy in a short August 2017 video featuring country head Brian Cu and Anthony Tan reassuring customers Grab was acting on pricing surge and driver job acceptance and other issues, with Tan ending with the injunction to “Let's GrabBayanihan together” (Tan & Cu, 2017).

The styling of Grab for Good took a sharp turn upward during the COVID-19 pandemic. As we outlined above, Grab only moved into food delivery in 2018. This proved good timing, as it was well positioned to expand its service delivery and take advantage of the extraordinary push to digitization and digital services during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in the 2020–2022 years. In Singapore, as well as in its other markets, the Grab food delivery platforms and workers gained a visibility and appreciation, because it was relied on by so many households who had the means to afford it. Super apps such as Grab were at the heart of this entrenchment of digital transactions; and visually, photos, videos, and social media posts capturing Grab delivery achieved an iconic status (in turn, becoming the new face of Grab's brand and advertising). In Singapore, the mood was captured by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in his 2021 National Day speech, in which he lauded the “everyday heroes” and highlighted the need for give lower-wage workers [LWWs], specifically naming Grab delivery workers, “more secure futures” (Lee, H. L., 2021).

In concluding this discussion of the Grab Way as the crucial symbolic, material ethos of assembling a digital transaction platform, it is important to indicate the various ways, many well documented, that there is divergence from such intentions and ideals––pointing up the contradictory aspects and dark sides of Grab's values. In the area of consumers and users, we discussed in the previous section the concerns over anti-competitive behaviour, choice, pricing and affordability, and service quality, deemed sufficiently serious for regional regulators to take action. In the area of work and labour, an extensively researched area of platform studies, there are a raft of issues, including control, tracking and surveillance of drivers, work conditions (Wulansari et al., 2024), risk (Nowak, 2023), injury, impairment, and the nature of the economic inclusion Grab and other offers workers such as people with disability who typically lack adequate and fair inclusion (Hong, 2024). Despite the “hyperlocal” ethos and the kudos Grab has garnered for listening to its local customers, there is a more complex picture to be painted. For one thing, country subsidiaries seem be highly controlled by the company-at-large. In the case of Grab Vietnam, to take one example, while there is the local holding company with its charter, and agreement with the local partner, the control and veto power of Grab holding is clear, as detailed in its filings (Grab, 2023, p. 110). There are a range of other areas also, notably environmental sustainability, where Grab seeks to burnish its “for Good” credentials. Paying attention to the Grab Way, as part of the larger analysis of Grab, super apps, and digital platforms, is attention for a range of reasons. What we would suggest is that in how Grab's leaders narrate its organization, we can discern a moral economy and order (Forster and Horst, 2018; Sadowski et al., 2024)––not only in its goods and services, but in the wider creation of the market (Thompson, 1971) in digital transactions that it is helping to bring about. It is this moral economy that Grab was keen to flesh out and publicize, in consolidating its investment and capital base, suite of interlocking monetization strategies, control and harvesting of its wide and deep digital transaction chains––and as it pitches for recognition from a secure and distinctive mastery of its regional markets and legal, regulatory, and governance institutions, pursuing global heft.

The grab way of going global

The most influential investor in Grab has been the Japanese company Softbank. Softbank has been a leading actor in start-ups and developing scale in technology corporations over at least two decades, especially its SoftBank Vision Fund (Goggin, 2022). In December 2014 Softbank invested $250 million funding in GrabTaxi, becoming its largest investor. Softbank was already an investor in its rival Uber, as well as recently taking stakes in Asian e-commerce groups, Tokopedia and Snapdeal (India). Son has played a leading, highly visible role in supporting Grab at key moments. One symbolic high point was when Grab CEO Tan, Grab Indonesia President Ridzki Kramadibrata, and Softbank CEO Son met with President Joko Widodo at the Merdeka Palace in Jakarta and committed to investing US$2 billion over 5 years to “speed up Indonesia's development of digital infrastructures” (Priyashini, 2019). Another key figure is Ming Maa, who led Softbank's investment in Grab in 2014 and 2016, then joined Grab, serving as its President from 2016 to 2024.

As we disentangle Grab's web of investors, what also comes into sharp focus is the constitutive role of its rivals. Most notable in the early years was Uber, which has served Grab well as a foil. Uber has been both competitor and at times played the roles of friend and investor, especially when it took a controlling stake in Grab. This transpired when in March 2018, Grab announced that it had acquired Uber's Southeast Asia operations in 2018, and in return Uber would take 27.5% stake in Grab. This positioned Grab to leverage UberEats assets and network to expand into the new area of food delivery, with the launch of GrabFood.

As the news broke of the Uber-Grab merger, the two firms faced threats from regulators in three countries, Singapore, the Philippines, and Malaysia, acting on concerns that the new entity, with its ownership and control structure, would have deleterious implications for competition and consumers. Once it became public, Singapore's competition regulator cast a pall on the celebrations, kicking off an investigation into whether the merger was anti-competitive. At the end of the process in September 2018, the CCCS issued its final decision on the merger, its CEO Toh Han Li, declaring that the alliance “removed Grab's closest rival, to the detriment of Singapore drivers and riders” (CCCS, 2018a, p. 4). The CCCS fined Uber approximately $6.58 million and Grab $6.42 million (CCCS, 2018b, p. 142) to “deter completed, irreversible mergers that harm competition” (CCCS, 2018a, p. 4), surely a quixotic sentiment given the comparatively slight size of the penalties. Grab was also left free to proceed with the takeover, with only some minor conditions. Nonetheless Uber (rather than Grab) decided to appeal the decision to Singapore's Competition Appeal Board, but the appeal was rejected in a 2020 decision (CAB, 2020, p. 121). In the Philippines and Malaysia competition regulators also sought to intervene into the merger and its conditions, with the Philippines imposing tougher measures than either Singapore's featherlight remedies or Malaysia's even weaker strictures (Healey, 2020; Icasiano & Araz, 2021).

As well as Uber, the second major contest that has helped define Grab's identity is its competition and manoeuvers with its Indonesian super app competitor, Gojek. When it launched in Singapore in 2018, as part of its regional expansion, Gojek focused on ride-hailing services while cautiously investigating how to offer food delivery service. Ultimately Gojek floundered in the Singapore market and failed to make much headway with its regional plans in Southeast Asia either. Gojek did hold its ground in its fast-growing, massive home market, fortified by a merger with Tokopedia in 2021 creating the GoTo group. In 2023–2024, GoTo spun off its Tokopedia arm in a partnership with ByteDance's Tiktok. As well as providing a neat regulatory fix for ByteDance to restart its Indonesian business, the new arrangement allowed users to make purchases without leaving the Tiktok app). Despite Gojek first-mover position as a super app and its cultural and political status in Indonesia, Grab still established itself as the other dominant player in what became an effective duopoly in the archipelago nation. Yet as competition intensified in their various markets, and in the face of years of losses, it came as no surprise to hear of serious merger talks between GoTo and Grab in the first half of 2025 (Guild, 2025), with the CCCS suggesting the parties seek legal advice on compliance with Singapore competition laws (Straits Times, 2025b).

What is evident is that Grab's interactions with Southeast Asia regulators on competition and consumer policy (Mutiarin et al., 2019), not to mention other areas such as labour law and practices, safety, finance, and banking, become a constant if not constitutive feature of their expansion across different kinds of markets (transport, food delivery, digital payment and wallets) as well as jurisdictions––a kind of background noise that proceeds as the Grab group of companies conglomerates (Srnicek, 2024). Grab's regulatory skirmishes highlight the ways that the mega corporation is perpetually on the move in a kaleidoscope of investment, alliances, mergers, crossholdings, and control with other players in the evolving ride-hailing and super app market. Grab's ambitions move to the next level, with its high-profile public listing on the US NASDAQ in December2021.

In preparation for its listing on NASDAQ, Grab's already complex corporate holdings and structure took an even more recondite turn. Grab chose to merger with a Special-Purpose Acquisition Company or SPAC. SPAC have no commercial operations, rather are created solely to acquire an existing company and have become a popular, more under-the-radar way to raise capital for an IPO (D’Alvia, 2022). In particular, SPAC promised a way to circumvent the disclosure obligations and costs attendant on a company doing an IPO itself, something highlighted in mounting concerns from regulators and resulting in the SEC adopted rules to “enhance disclosures and provide additional investor protection” in SPAC IPOs (SEC, 2024). In its case Grab merged with one of the New York-based private tech investment firm Altimeter Capital's SPACs, securing a record-breaking valuation of nearly US$40 billion. It also had a $4 billion in private investment in public equity (PIPE) investment, where companies sell shares in exchange for capital from large investors to help mitigate transaction and market risk (D’Alvia, 2022, pp. 179–181). Into the bargain, the SPAC path allowed CEO Tan to consolidate his control over Grab, ending up with “60.4 per cent of the voting power while owning just 2.2 per cent of the newly listed company” (Ruehl & Kruppa, 2021) (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Grab's CEO, Anthony Tan, and co-founder Tan Hooi Ling, celebrate NASDA IPO listing in Singapore bell-ringing ceremony (Source: Grab. 2021).

Grab's NASDAQ launch was turbulent, with shares opening at US$13.06, then falling below $9 in early trading (Ruehl & Kruppa, 2021). Press commentary noted that Grab had yet to turn a profit, with Tan seeking to calm the waters by averring that “our focus is on the super app and that is resilient in spite of COVID” (quoted in Wang and Sebastien, 2021). In the following months, the share price continued to fall, not helped by Grab reporting significant losses. With the company under pressure, its business strategy came under intense criticism especially the primacy of its super app business model and how this worked. Grab's losses mounted through 2022 and 2023. Its share price plunged to a low of US $2.33 in June 2022, improving slightly to oscillating around the US$5 dollar mark in the first half of 2025. Grab announced cost-cutting measures, including cutting 1000 jobs, aiming for profitability in 2024 (Ruehl, 2022) amid rising concerns from market participants.

Grab pinned its hope on new offerings in digital finance, especially unifying all its financial service products, digital payments, insurance, lending, and wealth management options under the new brand GrabFin in May 2022, starting in Singapore and Malaysia then rolling it out to its other Southeast Asian markets. Grab won digital banking licences in Singapore (via a joint banking venture with Singtel; GXS Bank) and Malaysia (partnering with Singtel and Kuok Brothers; GX Bank), creating the GXS Group to oversee these two enterprises. GXS Group extended its reach in Indonesia via investment in Superbank (also backed by Singtel), which in early 2025 was considering an IPO in Jakarta at the same time as it moved to integrate with Ovo, the Grab-backed digital wallet.

By the end of 2024, Grab's losses had narrowed at US$105 million and revenues were slowly rising to US$2.8 billion, amounting to dampening growth that triggered a tumble in its share price––and a tough road ahead, as one masthead put it, to “become a more financially mature company” (Straits Times, 2025a).

Conclusion

In this paper, we have sought to provide an analysis of the super app as a highly influential, and in Asia, perhaps the dominant form of digital transaction platforms. We have advanced this account via the case of Grab, an ambitious and expansive super app which exemplifies the crucial and constitutive role that mobile media and communication technologies have come to play in the contemporary phenomenon of digital platforms.

In some of the markets it operates in––such as Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines—Grab has become a necessary utility for those who can afford to use it (that is, typically upper middle-class users and lower middle class workers), especially for transport and mobility options in contexts where public transportation systems are inadequate and receding. Diversifying from ride-hailing services, Grab also has achieved market share in food and urban delivery. By using this foundation to create widespread use of its payment gateway, Grab has pursued a dominant market position in digital transactions, encompassing payments, savings, lending, insurance, and investment services. As a consequence, its e-wallet is widely relied in some markets, while the newer services across banking, credit, insurance, and loans are still at early stages. There are home-grown competitors in the Southeast Asia region, such as Gojek in Indonesia, but Grab has achieved a much higher share of the digital transactions market (around 32%) in that market and comparably strong positioning elsewhere. By cementing a hold over customers, Grab has developed symbolic power and generated cultural capital as a company that signifies a set of values––close to an ideology––of the super app.

As we note, one of the major things underpinning Grab's success is its underlying “escrow platform” model that pools peer to peer transactions within the business. In this respect, Grab's becoming as a super app hinges on its canny and unremitting focus on capital growth, thriving in the ecosystems of digital capital and mutually supporting markets, especially through its close relationships with leading players and competition-meets-collaboration relationships with key players such as DiDi, Uber, and others. The zenith of Grab's ambition, so far at least, is its listing on the US NASDAQ. How Grab achieved this aim is an instructive story in the complex synthetic nature of digital capitalism (Frolov, 2024) but also hints at some of the potential limits of becoming a global corporation on the basis of channelling other people's money as the main source of profit.

In reflecting on what the case of Grab tells us about the super app as a conglomeration of apps and transaction functions, we would suggest three things above all: First, an analysis of Grab offers an anatomy of the transactional, financial, affordance, socio-technical, business, and governance architectures of the super app. Second, Grab underscores the importance of the specific local and regional contexts and dynamics and imagination of the super app. Third, Grab also points to the need for alternatives to the super app's enlistment of everyday life and users, technologies and institutions, capital and resources into the kind of “essential”, “convenient”, conglomerated app, and corporate entity it represents.

As we have detailed, Grab has come a long way in a relatively short time and gone some way to establishing itself as the “Southeast Asia” super app, at least in sectors such as mobility, food delivery, and payments. In the process, Grab achieved international prominence, presence, and backing. Grab has been a key player in making a new kind of market. Its pivotal role and continuing expansion are backed by deep investor pockets, substantive infrastructural growth, collaborating with regional and global players in reconfiguring traditional and digital economy, as well as leveraging traditional business strategies in terms of driving labour costs down, process re-engineering, and pursuing technology and associated innovation. Image and identity crafting has been a key part of the Grab story, with public relations and branding efforts to the fore. Less visible has been the way that Grab's trajectory has been shaped by pressures of and negotiations with competitors, as well as attempts to forestall and by-pass regulation. Debate on the interplay of these and other factors in Grab's ascendancy continues unabated but would be greatly assisted by more reliable and comprehensive information and data as well as critical research.

However, despite its taken-for-granted nature in some domains, its reach, market prospects, financial prospects, and profitability are still fragile. Also very interesting to consider is Grab's larger purpose, laid out in its “Grab Way”. “Grab for Good” is a pervasive feature of the firm's identity but has not been widely questioned on its own terms––let alone as part of a deeper questioning of the tech for good visions of digital platforms. Grab's lock on everyday life rests upon the taken-for-granted digitization of transactions. However the consequences of these changes––and their promises of financial and social inclusion, and other social goods––are not determined. Their continuing interaction with established transactional norms and cultures as well the wider unfolding of social and technical forms leaves open a wide field of possibilities to imagine what these infrastructures might and should look like in the future.