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the Tans offered aggressive promotions for drivers and
discounts for passengers.
In December 2014, as Uber’s private-market valua-
tion soared past $40 billion, Anthony was summoned
to Tokyo to meet with SoftBank chairman Masayoshi
Son—one of the world’s most influential tech investors.
After an hour of conversation, Son cut to the chase: He
intended to play godfather in ride-hailing, and he was
making an offer Tan shouldn’t refuse. (“You don’t take
my money, not so good for you,” Tan recalls Son saying.)
SoftBank reportedly invested $250 million in
GrabTaxi, for a stake whose size neither company has
disclosed. So far, for both Tan and Son, that invest-
ment has proved good indeed. SoftBank has led sev-
eral more fundraising rounds for Grab, most recently
for $1.46 billion in early March. And Son, who also is
a major shareholder in Uber, played a decisive role in
persuading that company to sell out to Grab.
Son’s investment initially sounded like bad news
for Go-Jek. But global investors were beginning to
scramble for opportunities to invest in the ride-hailingmodel outside the U.S., and Son’s
Grab stake only fed the frenzy. Ma-
karim offered these investors a new
angle: a super-app model.
Go-Jek had been a multiservice
venture from the outset. To keep
drivers employed all day, not just
during rush hours, Makarim had
encouraged them to supplement
passenger transport with courier
services, meal delivery, and other
endeavors. Shortly after the Go-Jek
app launched in January 2015, it
offered three options: Go-Bike,
Go-Send, and Go-Food. American
backers decried the menu as messy
and confusing, but Indonesian users
voted with their thumbs. Within a
year, Go-Jek had been downloaded
more than 11 million times. Ma-
karim kept adding services. He told
a tech conference in Jakarta later
that year, “If you want something,
whatever it is, in 60 minutes, as long
as it’s legal, then you can get it on the
Go-Jek app.”
The omnibus sensibility helped
Go-Jek break through. In October
2015 it won funding from Singa-
pore’s NSI Ventures and Sequoia
Capital. In 2016 it raised $550 mil-
lion in a round led by private equity
firms KKR and Warburg Pincus,
vaulting Go-Jek into the unicorn
club. By the time Grab joined the
super-app battle, rolling out the
payment platform GrabPay late in
2017, both companies had plenty of
financial ammunition for the fight.L
IKE GUNPOWDER, PASTA, and paper money, the
super-app is an innovation generally credited
to China. Among the earliest incarnations
was Alipay, the payment function created by
Alibaba in 2004 in tandem with its Taobao
e-commerce platform. Alipay has evolved
into China’s dominant mobile-payment method, a
digital wallet linked to bank accounts and credit cards
and used to pay bills, transfer money to friends, book
a hotel—or do just about anything else. Even more
versatile is WeChat, launched by Tencent Holdings in- WeChat was originally designed to exchange text
messages and photos, but Tencent added an Alipay-
like digital wallet function, along with a host of social
features to make the app quicker, quirkier, and stickier.
MOBILE FINANCE
Both Grab and Go-Jek
hope to borrow a page
from China’s Alipay and
WeChat apps, whose
“digital wallets” can
be used to pay for
just about everything.
GrabPay operates in
six Southeast Asian
nations—and could go
wider with help from a
new prepaid-card part-
nership with Mastercard.
Through Grab Financial
Services, Grab offers
loans to local consum-
ers and entrepreneurs
who otherwise have no
bank accounts, using
their digital-payment
histories to help estab-
lish creditworthiness.
Go-Jek’s Go-Pay sys-
tem currently operates
mostly in Indonesia;
the company says it’s
on pace to process well
over $6 billion worth of
transactions this year.
MOBILE GROCERIES
After Go-Jek launched
its app in 2015, Go-
Food quickly became
one of its most
popular menu options.
Founder Nadiem
Makarim originally saw
prepared-food delivery
as a way to keep drivers
busy during off-peak
hours. But it’s now a
sales driver in its own
right, processing more
than $2 billion worth of
food deliveries a year.
Go-Jek users can also
order groceries through
Go-Mart.
The GrabFood
restaurant-delivery
service expanded dra-
matically in early 2018,
when Grab bought the
Southeast Asian opera-
tions of Uber—includ-
ing UberEats. Grocery
delivery joined the port-
folio in August, when
Grab launched Grab-Fresh in partnership
with Malaysian delivery
service HappyFresh.MOBILE MISCELLANY
To combat the epic
gridlock in Jakarta and
other Indonesian cities,
Go-Jek has deployed
its motorcycle-taxi
fleet to bring on-
demand services to
its customers, with
options including Go-
Clean (housekeeping),
Go-Glam (hairstyling
and makeovers), and
even Go-Massage.
There’s no GrabDrug
or GrabDoctor—at least
not yet—but Grab in Au-
gust announced a joint
venture with China’s
Ping An Healthcare and
Technology to explore
delivering medical
consultations via app,
along with medicine
delivery and appoint-
ment booking.Grab and Go-Jek position themselves as “super-apps,” wooing
customers in fields far beyond the taxi business. Here are some other
industries in which they compete head-to-head.