Grab to up investment in Bengaluru centre

Grab, the ride-hailing company competing with Uber in Southeast Asia, will further enhance its investment in Bengaluru technology centre. It recently raised $2 billion from Didi and SoftBank.

The Singapore-headquartered company opened its technology centre in Bengaluru in March last year. Grab has R&D centres located in Beijing, Jakarta, Vietnam, Singapore and Seattle.

According to sources, the company is operating with around 25 engineering team along with FreeCharge, another SoftBank investee company in payment space. “The company has Raghuram Trikutam as Head of Engineering, Mobile Payments and Ruchika Sharma as Head of Human Resources,” said the source.

Grab has recruited majority of its people from FreeCharge. Trikutam also worked with FreeCharge as AVP Engineering for 2 years 11 months.

Arul Kumaravel, who is Grab Vice President, Engineering and located in Singapore, during the inauguration of the R&D centre said Bengaluru has established itself as the Silicon Valley of India and one of the global hubs in mobile technology.

“We are excited to extend our relentless search for global tech talent to this dynamic market. It will further expand our prowess in paymnent space,” Kumaravel said during the inauguration.

According to officials from Grab, the company wanted to expand its team size to 200 so that it can focus on developing new payments technologies for GrabPay, its digital payments platform. The company believes that it will deepen financial inclusion and increase access to mobile payments across Southeast Asia.

To strengthen its payment business, Grab invested $100 million in offline payment startup Kudo. Grab also depended on Go-Jek for payment which received $1.2 billion investment from Tencent in last May. The company was depending on AliPay for payment solution.