Southeast Asia’s largest ride-hailing app Grab is expanding the scope of its India engineering team to include geomapping and data science as the Singapore-based tech firm looks to offer a super app to its customers in the region, officials said.
Grab’s Bengaluru unit, one out its seven engineering and research & development centres, has so far been primarily focused on building payment systems for the platform.
The team of engineers and data scientists have now started working on a lending platform for Grab and would soon begin work on insurance offerings, Vikas Agrawal, chief technology officer, Grab Financial, told ET in an interview.
Grab offers its partners, who normally are shunned by traditional banking system, access to credit based on their transaction history on the platform.
Theo Vassilakis, chief technology officer at Grab, said the India team would also begin work for various features for its map in the main ride-hailing app. “We are also starting to work on the geo platform, which is maps like,” he told ET. “We have recently completed three billion rides and we have the data on that. We have also set up a lab to do a lot of research work. There is a big part of Southeast Asia which is unmapped. We are starting to build the team over here to support the geomapping.”
Grab plans to add 200 employees, primarily engineers, at the Bengaluru centre over the next 12-18 months to double its headcount even as it expands its scope to new areas, the two executives said.
Agrawal said the company would continue to focus actively on payment and other features to help it make a super app.
He said the Bengaluru R&D centre first started building the payments platform, like the core wallet platform, and then started working on the merchant solutions “because you have a QR code solution on the merchant side, or POS (point of sale) integration with various types of merchants”.
Then it started working on the insights platform, the KYC services risk platform, and then expanded to data engineering and data science work, Agrawal said.
Bengaluru is also the engineering hub for Grab’s rival Go-jek, which has built its team by acquiring local startups and plans to add more engineers.
Interestingly, Grab featured the Indian online ticketing platform BookMyShow on its app as one of the five platforms or startups through Grab Ventures Velocity programme. BookMyShow saw 70% increase in engagement. Grab also has OYO within the app to facilitate hotel booking for its users.
Leave a Reply