Travel Grab Become the First Decacorn in Southeast Asia

"Unicorn"It's been a pretty hot conversation for the past few weeks. The term unicorn which was previously attached to the startup business world, began to be discussed more and more frequently by various netizens, as well as the general public. Besides unicorn, both on social media and mass media, various conversations began to appear regarding other terms regarding the valuation level of startup companies. Starting from cockroach, Ponies, Centaur, Unicorn, Decacorns, to Hectocorns.

Term unicorn Initially it arose because startup companies with a valuation of $1 billion were still relatively rare in 2013. However, it turns out that the unicorn growing and increasing its valuation to over $10 billion. So that a new term appears, namely Decacorns (valuation reaches $10 billion) and Hectocorns (valuation reaches $100 billion).

Unicorn who has been promoted to decacorn including Uber, WeWork, Airbnb, SpaceX, Pinterest, and Grab. Since late 2018, Grab became the first startup company from Southeast Asia to win the title decacorn, with a current valuation of around $11 billion.

Grab originally founded by Anthony Tan and Hooi Ling Tan under the name MyTeksi in Malaysia in 2012. Then in 2013 they began to expand to the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand under the name GrabCab. Grab officially become unicorn in 2014 after securing Series D funding. This year too, GrabTaxi expands to Vietnam and Indonesia. GrabTaxi then launched other services such as GrabBecause, Grabfood, GrabBike, and so on, and changed its name to Grab in 2016.

Grab had acquired Kudo to support its payment technology in 2017. Grab also brings features GrabFresh, in collaboration with HappyFresh to serve purchases of fresh food ingredients. Founding father Grab Anthony Tan also said, "Whether it's food, whether it's food ingredients, we need to make sure everyone has adequate capital, both in terms of technology and in terms of finance."This goes to show that like any successful startup, technological innovation is also important to the journey Grab menjadi decacorn first in Southeast Asia.

In 2018, Grab also took several big steps, including by acquiring Uber's business in Southeast Asia. This acquisition is recorded as the largest corporate action for an internet company in Southeast Asia. Through this acquisition, all of Uber's assets and operational aspects in the Southeast Asia region (covering Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam) were transferred to Grab.

in the same year, Grab also cooperates with OVO as a payment option in using its services, by changing GrabPay to OVO Cash. Some of these big steps have been quite successful in increasing service quality Grab, as well as being "great app" which has been downloaded more than 138 million times to date.

Disclosure: This article is sponsored content endorsed by Grab.