By BLOOMBERG

SINGAPORE • Leading South-East Asian ride-hailing provider Grab raised about US$1.5 billion (RM6.15 billion) from SoftBank Group Corp’s Vision Fund, bankrolling its effort to expand into new services across the region.

The funding brings to about US$4.5 billion the amount of money the company has collected from investors in the past year, it said. SoftBank is already a major backer of the Singapore-based start-up, and the latest investment will boost its stake.

Grab founder Anthony Tan is battling Go-Jek for leadership in the South-East Asian market after vanquishing Uber Technologies Inc in the region last year. Tan is holding a press conference today in Indonesia, its rival’s home turf, and plans to spend a significant portion of the latest proceeds in the country.

Go-Jek has presented the thorniest challenge, with the Jakarta-based start-up marching into Grab’s home market of Singapore, as well as Vietnam and Thailand. Go-Jek, led by Tan’s Harvard Business School classmate Nadiem Makarim, is also raising additional capital to compete for customers and drivers.

South-East Asia’s two most valuable start-ups are aiming to expand swiftly in everything from mobile payments to food delivery. Go-Jek raised over US$1 billion in its ongoing funding round from a clutch of Internet giants including Google, JD.com Inc and Tencent Holdings Ltd, Bloomberg reported last month.

Both companies are using the proceeds to shore up their positions in Indonesia and expand around the region, while merging payments with ride-sharing and food delivery to create so-called super apps.

“It is an incredibly dynamic market where the consumer class is rapidly digitising. And within this digitisation, we see tremendous opportunities to continue growing our superapp platform,” president Ming Maa told Bloomberg Television. “We are already profitable in some of our most mature business segments and in our more mature markets.”

South-East Asia’s best-funded technology start-ups are raking in billions of dollars of investments.

The region’s Internet firms raised US$9.1 billion from venture capitalists, private-equity firms and corporate investors in the first half of last year, headed for an all-time record, a report from Google and Temasek Holdings Pte Ltd shows.

The industry raised US$9.4 billion in all of 2017, according to the November research.

The region’s ride-hailing market is expected to reach US$28 billion by 2025 from an estimated US$7.7 billion last year, the report shows, underscoring the ambition of Go-Jek and Grab to become South-East Asia’s super apps. Yesterday, Maa said his start-up had no plans for an initial public offering at this point, but was monitoring the impending debuts of Uber and Lyft Inc. — Bloomberg