From a ride-hailing service to a super app serving 41.9 million monthly users across eight Southeast Asian countries, Grab’s business strategy is that of continuous innovation. Central to achieving this is a reliable cloud infrastructure that supports the company’s rapid evolution.
This is why Grab announced AWS as its preferred cloud partner, leveraging a technology-led strategy to drive growth across its mobility, deliveries, and financial services verticals. During a media briefing, both companies shared details of the renewed partnership, including specific areas of innovation for the super app.
“To innovate, we need the ability to experiment with new capabilities while still maintaining cost efficiency and the stability of our services,” said Mohan Krishnan, Head of Engineering, Technical Infrastructure, Grab.
Eyes on the road
According to Krishnan, Grab’s technology strategy focuses on three key areas:
- Cost optimisation.
- The ability to scale swiftly and securely.
- Using AI and data to enhance product quality and experience.
“Innovation is built on the ability to experiment and improve our capabilities continuously. To that end, we need to make sure that our engineers and product teams can focus on that aspect without being burdened with things like managing the infrastructure,” he said.
One of the outcomes of Grab’s partnership with AWS is its machine learning platform, Catwalk, built on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS).
“Catwalk has enabled Grab to launch almost 1,000 AI models into production across a range of use cases,” said Gunish Chawla, Managing Director, Commercial Enterprise, Digital & SMB, ASEAN, AWS. “Some examples include route optimisation and pricing, which are critical to the logistics side of the business.”
Krishnan elaborated on Grab’s AI use cases, noting how merchants use AI to automatically load their menus without manual data entry. Additionally, AI guides drivers to secure higher-quality jobs and improve their earnings.
Grab is also using data and AI to make its services more affordable.
“A specific area where we’ve made good progress is with features like saver delivery and batching. We use our data systems to identify the various orders occurring in local areas and batch them into a single delivery. This enables us to operate at a lower cost since one driver handles multiple deliveries on the same route, rather than sending separate drivers. Drivers achieve higher transactions per trip, which boosts their earnings, while customers benefit from reduced delivery costs,” Krishnan explained.
Up in the sky
In terms of its cloud strategy, Krishnan clarified that although most of Grab’s workloads are hosted on AWS, the super app also uses Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
“There’s actually a trade-off in running a multi-cloud approach. It takes internal effort to build the right type of skill set within our teams, to work across multiple clouds. However, we feel that this strategy allows us to leverage the best capabilities from different cloud providers,” he said.
To optimise its AWS usage, Grab re-architected some of its systems, originally built on-premises, to make them more cloud-native.
“We need the right type of governance around cost control, security, and other aspects — which AWS provides — while also building internal competencies to use these capabilities and ensure we use the cloud in the most efficient and effective way,” Krishnan added.
Chawla pointed out that Grab’s multi-country footprint and diverse business operations necessitate a cloud partner capable of meeting the data and infrastructure demands across its markets.
“Grab needed to make sure that the cloud infrastructure is available across the region, and that their cloud provider offers the most functionality,” he said.
With data privacy and sovereignty laws requiring compliance, Grab has worked with AWS to meet regulatory standards.
“There are certain markets that require us to locate workloads or data in that particular country, and we’re glad AWS has been rolling out more data centres across Southeast Asia, because that simplifies our data management,” Krishnan noted.
Mapping the future
Beyond improving mobility and delivery services, Grab aims to extend technology access to small entrepreneurs and promote financial inclusion in Southeast Asia.
“One strategy that we’ve applied internally is building features and products that allow these small entrepreneurs — the mom-and-pop shops — to self-serve, so they do not need to build internal capabilities within their teams to leverage technology,” Krishnan said.
When it comes to financial inclusion, Krishnan highlighted the underbanked and unbanked populations in Southeast Asia, which include many gig workers (six in 10 people in the region). To serve this market, Grab has established digibanks in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore.
“An example is GXS Bank in Singapore, which has a flexi-loan product offering a higher loan cap than our cash advance product. This helps our partners cover bigger-ticket expenses, like home renovations. Of course, we are happy to partner with AWS to continue progress on these fronts,” he added.
Leveraging its internal data on gig partners, Grab tailors its products and services to address their specific needs.
“We are making sure that these products are transparent, affordable, and accessible for them,” Krishnan emphasised.
