South-east Asian startups finding their place on the global stage 

Grab’s imminent public listing on the Nasdaq exchange is a milestone for Southeast Asia’s startup scene.

The move is a clear signal that the region is a serious player in Asia’s big tech field, which until now has been dominated by China and India.

The listing of Southeast Asia’s biggest ride-hailing and food delivery firm, launched by two Malaysian Harvard graduates just ten  years ago, is expected to be the region’s largest public listing ever, valuing the company at close to $40 billion.

Grab grew from being a simple taxi app in Kuala Lumpur into the region’s most valuable startup, with its cloud-based superapp providing ride-hailing and sharing, food and grocery deliveries, courier services, digital payments, messaging, insurance, and lending services to over 670 million residents in 428 cities in eight countries.

These numbers are global, and epic in scale and the world is taking notice – investors have flocked to Grab from across the planet. Grab’s journey is remarkable because it highlights the growing confidence our corner of Asia has earned by producing winning companies that can compete on the world stage, and it confirms that Southeast Asia’s startup culture has arrived.

The growing list of South-east Asian unicorns

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Adding momentum to the wave of interest that Grab’s success has triggered are several deals south of Singapore that are heating up the competition for Southeast Asia's US$100 billion digital economy.

Indonesia’s two most valuable tech unicorns, ride-hailing app Gojek and e-commerce giant Tokopedia are set to merge to create GoTo, the largest internet company in the world’s fourth most populous country, while also exploring a listing in Jakarta and a mega IPO in New York next year.

Gojek has a similar evolution story to Grab – starting as a simple solution to a need that the cloud helped to fulfil and then scale. It’s since evolved into a superapp with 125 million downloads - nearly half of the country’s population.

The new $40 billion GoTo entity will be a formidable force offering services across e-commerce, food delivery, payments, messaging, and logistics with more than two million driver-partners and over 11 million SME merchants regionally.

This merger could even challenge Singapore’s SEA, considered the most valuable listed company in the region. Meanwhile Indonesia’s online travel booking platform Traveloka is in advanced talks to go public in the US along with Singapore’s regional online real estate firm PropertyGuru.

Regionalisation, equitable growth

What is amazing about these South-east Asian startups is their ability to traverse and appeal to different countries and cultures, while innovating constantly and building new products and services - local ideas born in one country translate perfectly in other countries, becoming global.

Communities are being built across the region on these superapps, and people who were previously offline are connecting more closely and more meaningfully to improve their lives as devices are made more accessible.

This ‘regionalisation’ is proving to be a great equaliser – technology is being spread throughout the region across socioeconomic lines, and the benefits of cloud technology are realised, as these startups use the cloud to deliver value to their users.

And as more people and companies digitise, equitable economic growth spreads and prosperity becomes more democratised across the region. Companies like Grab and Gojek are bringing growth and innovation to millions of merchants, riders, drivers, and shoppers using cloud technology to rapidly scale their business, adapt with demand, and solve problems we did not have just months ago. 

Primed to succeed in the digital era and post-Covid world 

Because these startups were born with a digital-first mindset, their ability to adapt and pivot quickly made them better prepared for disruption.

The effects of the global Covid-19 pandemic drove a spike in demand for online shopping, working, deliveries, education, entertainment, and even telehealth, but the overriding net result of the pandemic on the tech sector was accelerated innovation and digitisation as people turned to the cloud to cope with new realities under lockdowns.

Vast compute resources were increasingly democratised as startups brought the power of big data into the palms of millions of users. Digital innovation has also delivered equitable opportunity to those who lacked it before the pandemic and will continue to do so in the future. 

Startups like Gojek, Grab, Tokopedia, and Traveloka all used cloud technology to help otherwise underemployed people make a better living, bring the power of big data to small businesses, and provide people with easy access to e-commerce, financial services, insurance, travel, and transport, to name a few.

Companies born in the cloud can continuously evolve and grow, shifting priorities with world events and experimenting with new technology while taking chances on new ideas.

With this agility, these startups have shown the world that our region is no longer just a manufacturing, tourism, and agricultural hub – we are now officially a technology and innovation powerhouse, and the outlook for our region’s startup culture is bright.  

The writer is managing director, APJ, at Amazon Web Services.