Anthony Tan & Tan Hooi Ling
Grab
Super-app for ride-hailing, food delivery and digital payments across Southeast Asia · Singapore
Portrait: Masato Kanda / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
The founder
Anthony Tan (Singaporean) and Tan Hooi Ling (Malaysian, a mechanical engineer and former McKinsey consultant) met at Harvard Business School in a class on serving underserved markets. Their taxi-safety idea won second prize at HBS’s 2011 New Venture Competition; they launched MyTeksi in Kuala Lumpur in June 2012, which grew into Grab — Southeast Asia’s first unicorn.
How it was taken public
Grab merged with SPAC Altimeter Growth Corp, announced April 13, 2021 and closed that December, listing on Nasdaq at a pro-forma equity value of roughly $39.6 billion (widely rounded to "$40 billion") — at the time the largest blank-check merger ever done, including a $4 billion PIPE from BlackRock, Fidelity, T. Rowe Price and Temasek. Anthony Tan retained majority voting control via a dual-class share structure.
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In the news
Coverage of the Grab deal from independent outlets — read the original reporting, not just our summary.
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