Ride-hailing and supply firm Grab has introduced plans to go public within the U.S. Based in Singapore, the corporate has developed from a ride-hailing app to a Southeast Asian tremendous app that provides a number of client providers, together with meals supply, monetary providers, equivalent to an e-wallet so to ship and obtain cash.
It operates in Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. According to Crunchbase, the corporate has raised over $10 billion, together with from SoftBank’s Vision Fund.
In order to go public, Grab has chosen to merge with a SPAC named Altimeter Growth Corp. A SPAC is a publicly-traded blank-check firm primarily based within the U.S. Going public by way of this course of needs to be a lot simpler for Grab — particularly as a result of it’s a international firm.
If the deal goes by way of, it could be the world’s largest SPAC merger. Grab could be listed on NASDAQ underneath the image ‘GRAB’.
Part of the announcement, Grab has shared some metrics and a few huge numbers. In 2020, the corporate managed to generate round $12.5 billion in gross merchandise worth (GMV). The merger would worth Grab at $39.6 billion and the corporate would hold $4.5 billion in money.
The firm thinks there’s nonetheless a whole lot of room to develop in relation to meals supply and on-demand mobility in Southeast Asia. It expects to see the full addressable market soar from $52 billion to $180 billion by 2025.
“This is a milestone in our journey to open up access for everyone to benefit from the digital economy. This is even more critical as our region recovers from COVID-19. It was very challenging for us too, but it taught us immensely about the resiliency of our business,” Grab co-founder and CEO Anthony Tan mentioned within the announcement.
“Our diversified superapp strategy helped our driver-partners pivot to deliveries, and enabled us to deliver growth while improving profitability. As we become a publicly-traded company, we’ll work even harder to create economic empowerment for our communities, because when Southeast Asia succeeds, Grab succeeds,” he added.
Altimeter has agreed to a three-year lockup interval for its sponsor shares, which implies that Altimeter ought to stay dedicated to the corporate for some time.
