Robots could become as important to Grab’s future as its human drivers.
But Carri has already been plying the corridors of Grab’s Singapore headquarters, says chief technology officer Suthen Paradatheth. And Carri’s not alone. “We don’t oblige our business units to just use our robots,” Paradatheth told Fortune during an interview on the sidelines of the Asia Tech (ATx) summit. “If you go to the Grab office now, you’ll see robots from other companies as well. We use a 1+n strategy which keeps us on our toes.”
“Our mission was to make taxis safer in Kuala Lumpur,” Paradatheth explained. “Ling told me a story of starting a call with her mom whenever she rode home at night; even if they didn’t speak, it was a way to make sure the driver knew she was being monitored by someone.” The anecdote hit home for Paradatheth, whose own sister had similarly recounted feeling unsafe while riding taxis. “I saw a very real problem to get involved in,” he said.
Paradatheth joined full-time in 2015 and followed the company to Singapore, where it rebranded to Grab. He then moved through roles including chief of staff and head of engineering at Grab’s Singapore research and development center, before being appointed as CTO in 2022.
“A lot of folks have grown with the company, just like me,” he said. “Many of the senior leaders in the company are people who were with me during the 2012 storeroom days; they came as interns and are now heads of engineering.”
Grab, No. 128 on Fortune’s Southeast Asia 500 list, reported $2.8 billion in revenue last year, up from just $469 million in 2020.
Paradatheth credits the global rise of smartphone ownership for Grab’s growth, but he remembers a time when the device wasn’t quite so ubiquitous. “Back in 2012, smartphones were still a thing that only early adopters were buying.”
“In Southeast Asia, we’re working under pretty tight economic constraints, with most markets being emerging markets,” Paradatheth said. “And so engineering for that—both in terms of optimizing for what the customer has and what they can use, and making sure we’re constantly able to drive down costs—have been things we’ve invested in from those early days.”
“We found that third-party mapping providers just didn’t have the coverage we wanted,” Paradatheth explained. “For example, the small side roads which our two-wheel riders on motorcycle taxis use weren’t really captured in third-party maps.”
“Southeast Asia, in particular, has layers of locality,” he said. “There are thousands of languages, but also lots of tourists from China, Japan and South Korea who come to visit, and often, English isn’t their primary language.”
Grab is also working to strengthen AI literacy and adoption in the markets it operates in. The platform will launch a program for small- and medium-sized enterprises in its home market of Singapore, hoping to encourage AI adoption across 10,000 food and beverage, e-commerce, and retail firms.
Still, Grab’s push towards AI is worrying some who rely on the platform for their income. The platform is making a big push towards automated driving, investing in several self-driving vehicle startups and launching a robobus in Singapore.
Paradatheth swears that humans will remain at the heart of all Grab’s operations. “We don’t see our autonomous vehicles or delivery robots as substitutes for people,” he said. “We see them as complementary to what our driver partners already do.”
Looking forward, he wants Grab to become a global leader in urban embodied AI. “There’s an opportunity to provide all kinds of optimization—to make journeys smoother, and living in cities more enjoyable and fun.”
