Ride-hailing firm Grab will roll-out robobuses in its home city of Singapore in early 2026, building on its large investment in autonomous vehicle technologies.
Grab co-founder and CEO Anthony Tan made the announcement Tuesday during the company’s quarterly earnings, covering the three months ending Sep. 30.
“Grab will continue to build new partnerships with more global remote driving and AV leaders, participate in more pilots to understand the operational conditions for different driverless services, and be part of the regulators’ efforts to improve transport connectivity through driverless technologies,” Tan said in prepared remarks.
Grab ran a successful pilot of autonomous vehicles in September, rolled out in partnership with WeRide, a Chinese robotaxi operator. Earlier this year, Grab announced it would make a “strategic equity investment” in WeRide, to be completed in the first half of next year.
Then, in late October, Grab also invested in U.S.-based May Mobility, another provider of autonomous vehicles. May Mobility started to provide commercial rides on robotaxis in the U.S. earlier this year.
In an Q&A with analysts, Tan called the investments part of a “long-term strategy to lead the adoption of AV and remote driving across Southeast Asia.” Yet he admitted that self-driving vehicles may have a steeper hill to climb in the region, due to lower labor costs compared to developed markets like the U.S. or Singapore. “It will require considerable time for the unit economics to reach parity with human drivers.”
Tan also suggested how Grab might upskill its current human drivers as it explores self-driving vehicles. “We see new kinds of jobs emerging. For example, drivers could be remote safety drivers, data labelers; they could change LiDARs, cameras, and so forth.”
A bumper quarter
In its most recent quarter, Grab reported revenue of $873 million, 22% higher than the same period the year before. The tech company reported double-digit growth in all three of its business areas: deliveries, ride-hailing and finance. Ride-hailing revenue grew 17% year-on-year to $317 million, deliveries grew 23% to $465 million, and financial services had the fastest growth at 39% to $90 million.
The company also hiked its profits forecast for the full year; it now expects $480 million to $500 million in adjusted EBITDA for 2025.
Still, Grab shares fell by 4.7% in U.S. trading on Tuesday, perhaps due to low growth in profit for the current quarter. Grab reported $17 million in net income, just slightly more than the $15 million reported a year ago.
During the earnings call, Tan also re-affirmed the firm’s commitment to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into its workflow, to enhance both “internal efficiencies and external innovation”. Over 98% of Grab’s engineers now use AI to code, which accelerates their development cycles.
AI technology has also boosted user experience on its apps, Tan added, with visually impaired users benefitting from its boosted speech recognition abilities, which now recognizes speech across regional accents with a 90% accuracy rate, up from 46%.