Former Grab Lending Head Joins Digital Lender Julo

The former head of lending for Grab Holdings, Ankur Mehrotra, is joining Indonesian fintech startup Julo, which focuses on digital lending, a Bloomberg report noted.

Mehrotra was a former managing director of Grab Financial, and left the company earlier this year after six years at that job.

He also briefly served as a consultant for BukuWarung, an Indonesian startup, and has now joined Julo. Mehrotra confirmed the move. His job with Julo will entail working on the overall strategy and corporate finance, including international expansion, fundraising and mergers and acquisition.

Julo’s work is centered around letting users withdraw and send cash, make online purchases and pay bills. The startup raised $80 million in a funding round last April.

His work with Grab included setting up the ride-hailing provider’s car leasing business. He also led debt fundraising and helped build Grab’s lending business.

Grab has said its focus is on sustainable growth going forward, wanting to focus on profitability by 2024.

Read more: Grab Focuses on Efficiency and Profitability by 2024

The firm was valued at around $10.8 billion as of September this year, and it thinks revenue is likely to grow by 45% to 55% in the next year. It wants to hit the breakeven point by the second half of 2024, on group adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. And it wants to hit its breakeven point for its digital bank operations.

The company has a new solution called Just-in-Time Allocation, to improve accuracy of food preparation time estimates. The new solution will let orders be allocated to drivers to have them arrive just before or right after the food is ready.

Grab wants to boost on-demand efficiency for core verticals and make productivity better. The new solutions have allowed drivers to make shorter stops, deliver larger batches and boost the overall productivity. Grab saw 19% higher batch rates and an 11% increase in trips per transit hours as of August this year.