Grab Ventures to invest $250m in Indonesian start-ups
Grab Ventures, the VC arm of ride-hailing app operator Grab, has committed IDR3 trillion ($250 million) to a program that will invest in Indonesian start-ups.
Deployments will be made over the next three years with a focus on companies with online-to-offline (O2O), mobility, food, logistics, and financial technology-related business models. The plan extends a $700 million investment program launched by Grab in February aimed at supporting the digitization of the Indonesian economy.
The latest commitment will concentrate on scaling start-ups nationally and regionally. It will be supported by an accelerator program known as Velocity in partnership with MDI Ventures, Amazon Web Services, Creative Economy Agency, a VC unit of Telkom Indonesia, and Indonesia's Ministry of Communications & Information Technology.
“With the rapid growth of mobile connectivity and smartphone ownership, Indonesia can, and should, be the biggest digital economy in the region,” H.E. Rudiantara, the department's minister, said in a statement. “Indonesia has been the home of some notable tech unicorns, and we believe more regional or global tech leaders can emerge from Indonesia.”
Since its founding in 2012, Grab has built the largest transportation network in Southeast Asia with a presence in about 90 cities across seven countries. The company says Indonesia is its largest market and claims a 65% market share in the local ride-hailing space. In May, it launched an initiative aimed at increasing the earnings of five million micro-entrepreneurs in the country through technology.
In addition to its core transportation-focused products, Grab has branched out into other verticals such as courier, digital payment, and take-out food delivery services. The company launched its venture arm in June with a view to partnering up to 10 start-ups over the next two years with an emphasis on companies that have strong synergies with Grab.
Earlier this month, Grab raised $2 billion in a round led by Toyota Motor with participation from Ping An Capital, Oppenheimer Funds, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Macquarie Capital, and a vehicle established by Mirae Asset Capital and South Korea’s Naver. the company has raised more than $6 billion in total.
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