Ride hailing in Southeast Asia still have its potential to grow. Since the investors are keep investing to the major ride hailing company in the region. The newest investment has been done by technology giant, Microsoft which announces its investment to Grab. The undisclosed investment will create further growth for company that based in Singapore.
As reported on Tech In Asia, Microsoft investment is a part of strategic partnership for both companies. Grab will able to use Microsoft products like Azure, the Microsoft's cloud platform, Outlook integration, and any other Microsoft expertise including artificial intelligence.
"Our partnership with Grab opens up new opportunities to innovate in both a rapidly evolving industry and growth region," said Executive Vice President of Microsoft, Peggy Johnson
Both companies also declaring collaboration in deep technology projects which covering big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Such as, Grab will explore utilizing Microsoft Azure’s data analytics and fraud detection services to better predict and prevent fraudulent transactions on Grab’s platform; Exploring image recognition and computer vision technologies that will improve the user and driver pickup experience.
Grab president, Ming Maa said that the partnership will aiming to pursue better user experience of the services. The deal will able to enhance on-demand transportation and other online to offline services through better big data and artificial intelligence.
Microsoft decision to invest in Grab will tighten the regional ride hailing competition. Since another technology giant such as Google was also had invested in Grab competitor, Go-Jek on January.
Go-Jek which just launched its first expansion to Vietnam on August is Indonesian based ride hailing companies. Today the company becoming the only rival to Grab after Uber exited the Southeast Asia market. While Grab is already present in eight countries across Southeast Asia and have total valuation around US$ 11 billion.
“As a global technology leader, Microsoft’s investment into Grab highlights our position as the leading homegrown technology player in the region," Ming Maa add.
