GrabTaxi reported that it had secured an investment worth $250 million from SoftBank, a telecommunications and Internet giant from Japan.
The investment will provide the taxi-booking app with significant funds to expand in high-population Southeast Asia, where its services are currently focused.
GrabTaxi, which is based in Singapore, said that it is the biggest taxi-booking app in the region with about 60,000 taxi drivers operating within its network, over 500,000 currently active users and a total of 2.5 million downloads of its mobile app to date.
With the investment from Softbank, CEO and founder Anthony Tan revealed that the company has now already raised funding worth almost $340 million.
The investment decision by Softbank, which is known for the early investments that it made in Alibaba and Yahoo!, comes after the company's October announcement that it will be investing over $800 million in two startups from India, namely the e-commerce company behind the Snapdeal.com online marketplace and Ola Cabs of ANI Technologies, which is a taxi-booking service similar to GrabTaxi.
Tan, a Malaysian who formulated his idea for GrabTaxi back when he was a student at Harvard Business School, said that the company will be using the funding to be able to continue its focus on Southeast Asia, as opposed to expanding beyond the region. According to Tan, GrabTaxi has already reached profitability in several markets within the region.
Launched back in 2012, GrabTaxi has operations in 17 cities among the countries of Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand. The service works by having the user input their current location and their desired destination, which will then be sent to all nearby GrabTaxi drivers that can then claim the booking.
Uber, the prominent rival of the company, describes itself as a tech firm that connects their drivers with customers, which is a business strategy that has made it the target of criticism from local taxi operators and regulators. GrabTaxi, however, functions as a third-party app for booking taxi rides, allowing riders to connect with taxi drivers from various companies while operating within local taxi regulations.
"It is more fruitful to work with regulators to achieve our goals of improving the industry as a whole," said Tan, as Uber faces challenges from authorities in Thailand and Vietnam.
GrabTaxi also has a pair of units, namely GrabCar and GrabBike. GrabCar functions more closely to Uber's ride-sharing service, while GrabBike allows users to request for motorcycles in Vietnam.
