Delivery giant and superapp Grab is getting ready to make its Nasdaq debut under the ticker GRAB on Thursday (Dec. 2) during a livestreamed bell-ringing ceremony in Singapore.
The most valuable startup in Southeast Asia, Grab’s record-breaking public offering with the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Altimeter Growth values the company at $40 billion.
As part of the SPAC deal, Grab is poised to get $4.5 billion in cash, which includes $4 billion in private investment managed by Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, Singapore holding company Temasek, Fidelity, Altimeter, and T. Rowe Price, according to Business Insider.
See also: Altimeter SPAC Taking Grab Public In Mega New York Listing
Cofounded by Anthony Tan, who serves as CEO, and Tan Hooi Ling, COO, Grab started as a ride-hailing platform in 2012 and has since evolved into a technology platform offering food delivery, payments, insurance, investing, telemedicine, hotel reservations and other services for both consumers and merchants.
The company saw the demand for some of its services soar during the pandemic and posted a gross merchandise volume of $12.5 billion last year, over twice the level in 2018. As of September, Grab has close to 25 million monthly users and a workforce of roughly 7,000. The company operates in 400 cities across eight countries in Southeast Asia — Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam..
Read more: Grab To Go Public At Colossal $40 Billion Valuation
Some of Grab’s biggest backers include SoftBank, Uber and Toyota. The company had been in talks with J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley to find a SPAC merger deal.
During a third-quarter conference call, Tan told investors that the intensifying pandemic brought strict lockdowns in all eight markets Grab operated in. Vietnam especially had tight controls regarding ride-hailing and food delivery.
Volume for Grab’s on-demand everyday goods delivery service GrabMart for the third quarter of this year went up almost four times over the same period in 2020 and rose 78 percent from the second quarter of 2021.
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