Ride hailing start-up Grab which is now offering ewallet and food delivery service aims to become a regional Super App mobile solution provider.

The growth trajectory for Grab has been phenomenal to the extent prompting the company that started the ride hailing phenomena Uber, to graciously exit the playground due to homegrown advantage. Grab although is based in Singapore, the founder is Malaysian and belong to the reclusive Tan Chong family line. With the ambition of conquering Southeast Asia, Grab is already in the Philipines and Indonesia expanding into food delivery and ewallet services, a golden combination that is already transforming SEA to go cashless and embrace  convenient digital solutions. Housing over 600 million people, the region is gaining traction with the accelerated adoption of such products over mobile devices, so much so that has raised interest from the worlds largest investment firm, Softbank. The US$93 billion Japanese private equity arm already has stakes in Grab but is looking at increasing the fund size from its initial size of US$250 million to US$500 million but now is mulling to raise it to US$1.5 billion, showing a tremendous interest and confidence in the company.

Competition from Gojek which is funded by rival investors could be the trigger for Softbank to get deeper into Grab and assist the company to move faster. Indonesia based and with support from Tencent and Google, the rivalry is intense with Gojek looking at expanding its foot print from home country to the rest of Southeast Asia. Both have deep pocketed investors and the battle is who has the most capital and can last the longest.