Grab has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider as it pursues a technology-led strategy to accelerate growth across its mobility, deliveries and financial services verticals, including its new digibanks, while continuing to improve its operational efficiencies and reduce IT infrastructure costs.
The Southeast Asia-based super app serves 41.9 million monthly transacting users and over 13 million driver and delivery partners registered on its platform. Every second, Grab does over a hundred transactions, receives over 500,000 GPS pings and services over 50,000 ETA requests.
AWS powers Grab’s critical compute, storage, networking and database functions. By leveraging AWS’s resilient, secure, and elastic cloud, Grab accelerates innovation, rapidly launches new services and scales efficiently across its eight-country footprint — Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.
“At Grab, our strategy for growth is anchored on constant innovation to outserve the needs of our users and partners,” Suthen Thomas Paradatheth, CTO, Grab. ”This requires rapid experimentation, while ensuring security and stability, along with the ability to fully harness the potential of the latest tech like generative AI.”
On-demand transactions made by Grab customers were up 22% in the third quarter of 2024. To cater to this surge in demand for services, Grab uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) as its transactional database coupled with Amazon DynamoDB.
This promises to ensure high availability, scalability, and adaptability of its platform to drive exceptional customer experience fueled by more accurate searchable data. With AWS, Grab seamlessly adapts to evolving customer needs by easily adjusting resources dynamically based on user demand.
For example, during peak times like holiday sales, Grab can easily accommodate increased traffic to make transactions across the super app seamless. Conversely, during off-peak periods, resources can be scaled down to save costs.
As it looks to accelerate growth with initiatives focused on affordability, high-value offerings, and digital banking, AWS provides Grab with a stable and scalable infrastructure to support this rapid expansion. For instance, Grab continues to scale its revamped Advance Booking feature across the region.
Grab also did a region-wide roll out of its improved Group Order feature and continues to drive adoption for it, making it easier for users to join the group order, track food delivery updates and split the bill.
With AWS, Grab was also able to build and launch digital banks in Singapore and Indonesia, as well as GX Bank in Malaysia, which was launched in under 16 months, scaling rapidly to serve close to one million customers within the first year of launch.
As one of the pioneers of AI adoption in Southeast Asia, Grab intends to be at the forefront of exploring how the latest AI technologies can better serve and respond to the needs of its users and partners. Catwalk, Grab’s machine learning model platform, is built on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and has been used to deploy over 1,000 AI models in production, such as route guidance and pricing.
Additionally, Grab has rolled out a new feature that uses AI to create appetising descriptions of food dishes in five of its eight markets. This has boosted order completion rates, bringing particular benefits to smaller, unique restaurants on the platform and enhancing the overall dining experience for customers.
