Year: 2019

For all those wondering why we haven’t heard much out of out the Metroid Prime 4 camp since the title was announced at E3 2017 (with an admittedly underwhelming trailer), Nintendo just offered a surprisingly frank answer. Senior Managing Executive Officer Shinya Takahashi appeared in a video to explain that game development thus far has failed to live up to the company’s standards.

As such, the company is changing studios, returning Retro, which developed earlier entries in the Prime franchise. Retro producer Kensuke Tanabe will essentially be starting things over from scratch.

“This change will essentially mean restarting development from the beginning,” Takahashi explained, addressing the camera in a somber, apologetic tone, “so the completion of the game will be delayed from our initial internal plan. We strongly recognize that this delay will come as a disappointment to the many fans who have been looking forward to the launch of Metroid Prime 4.”

It’s a blow for one of Nintendo’s best-loved franchises — especially considering how long the game has been in the works. The move is also a highly unusual one for the company, including a very publicly facing apology. But in spite of a bit of a black eye in all of this, there’s something to be said for the exacting standards that would lead Nintendo to make such a difficult decision.

Facebook is planning to roll out end-to-end encryption for Instagram messages, as part of a broader integration effort across company’s messaging platforms, including WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

First reported by The New York Times, the social media giant said reworking the underlying infrastructure of its three messaging apps to allow users to talk to each other more easily. The apps will reportedly remain independent of one another — with Instagram and WhatsApp bringing in 1 billion and 1.5 billion respectively.

In doing so, Facebook is adding end-to-end encryption to Instagram messages. That will bring a new level of security and privacy to Instagram users for the first time. Facebook will also begin encrypting Facebook Messenger by default, which has to date required users to manually switch on the feature.

So far, only WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted by default.

The plans are part of the company’s effort to keep people on the platform for longer, the Times reported, at a time when the company has 2.2 billion users but user trust has declined following a string of privacy scandals and security incidents. End-to-end encrypted messages can’t be read beyond the sender and the recipient — not even Facebook. In shutting itself out of the loop, it reduces the amount of data it can access — and can be theoretically stolen by hackers.

“We want to build the best messaging experiences we can; and people want messaging to be fast, simple, reliable and private,” a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We’re working on making more of our messaging products end-to-end encrypted and considering ways to make it easier to reach friends and family across networks.”

“As you would expect, there is a lot of discussion and debate as we begin the long process of figuring out all the details of how this will work,” the spokesperson said, without providing a timeline on the planned unification.

But how the integration will be met by European regulators is anybody’s guess.

Two years ago, Facebook rolled back its plans to begin sharing WhatsApp user data with the social network for advertising at the request of U.K. data protection authorities, putting the plan on ice across the European continent. Under the proposed changes to its terms and conditions, WhatsApp would have shared the user’s phone number that was used to verify their account, and the last time they used the service. That led to concerns about privacy, given that a real-world identity isn’t needed for WhatsApp unlike Facebook, which requires users display their real names.

Facebook acknowledged that it didn’t have answers just yet about how it plans to navigate the issue, citing the early stages of its planned integration.

The app integrations are said to be a priority for 2019, with an eye for a 2020 release, the Times said.

Mobile cryptocurrency wallet BRD is announcing that it’s raised $15 million in Series B funding.

The funding comes from SBI Crypto Investment, a subsidiary of Japanese financial services company SBI Holdings (formerly a subsidiary of SoftBank). BRD said the funding will allow it to grow its product and engineering teams, and to expand in Japan and across Asia.

“SBI Group’s investment in BRD allows us to firmly cement ourselves in the Asian market,” said BRD co-founder and CEO Adam Traidman in a statement. “It shows incredible support for the foundation that we have built in North America and reinforces our proven ability to scale the success we have achieved in the past 4 years. The new investment will ensure our long-term global growth, and we are incredibly excited about collaborating with SBI as a strategic investor and business partner to make that happen.”

It’s surprising to see a crypto startup raising money now, given the broader crypto downturn. After all, BRD bills itself as the simplest way to start buying and storing cryptocurrencies — but does that mean anything if consumers are being scared away from investing?

When I asked Spencer Chen, the company’s vice president of global marketing (and an occasional friend of mine), about the industry’s recent challenges, he argued, “The need for a single, global currency still exists.”

“That’s what all got lost in 2018 as the fast-money, traders, and speculators came piling into the crypto space,” Chen told me via email. “It really convoluted the core mission of a natively digital currency. Money that worked just like the open internet. As a company that’s built-to-last and committed to the core mission of crypto currency, there was nothing more frustrating than to witness the many steps backwards the industry at large took in 2018.”

In fact, BRD says it doubled its total install base in 2018, ending the year with 1.8 million users globally. It also says it’s currently being used to store the equivalent of $6 billion mostly in Bitcoin and Ethereum — with a 24 percent increase in monthly active users between November and December, after it started accepting stablecoins (which are pegged to the value of a fiat currency).

BRD has now raised a total of $55 million. It’s also announcing a partnership with Coinify, allowing users to make cryptocurrency purchases using bank accounts in the European market.

The North American market can be a tough one to crack for a number of reasons, not the least of which is consumers’ continued reliance on carriers. Without their distribution channels, most handset makers just can’t get a foothold here. In a meeting earlier this week, HMD told me that North America is going to be its primary focus for 2019, a push that starts with a trio of carrier deals.

This morning, the Finnish smartphone maker announced that it will be bringing its Nokia-branded Android handsets to a trio of key carriers — Verizon and Cricket in the U.S. and Rogers in Canada. The U.S. devices are arriving this month, with Rogers’ arriving “very soon” through its Chatr brand.

Cricket users will get access to the Nokia 3.1 Plus, which focuses primarily on battery — it’s 3500mAh, which the company optimistically puts at two days of life. It’s a budget device, of course, priced at $160, sporting a 5.99 inch screen, a middling Snapdragon 439 and dual rear-facing cameras.

Verizon users will get access to the Nokia 2 V, which sports an even larger 4,000mAh battery and a 5.5 inch screen. That one will be available through Verizon stores on January 30. Rogers, meanwhile, will be getting the Nokia 2.1.

HMD’s already had pretty solid growth in its first few years of existence, bucking the trend of an otherwise stagnate mobile market. That growth comes thanks in part to its out of the gate brand recognition from acquiring Nokia IP, some buzzy early retro handsets, a focus on budget devices and its continued commitment to the oft-neglected feature phone market.

Huawei had a very good 2018, and it’s likely to have a very good 2019, as well. But there’s one little thing that keeps putting a damper on the hardware maker’s global expansion plans. The U.S. and Canada have already taken action over the company’s perceived link to the Chinese government, and now Vodafone’s is following suit over concerns that other countries may join. 

The U.K.-based telecom giant announced this week that it’s enacting a temporary halt on purchases from the Chinese hardware maker. The move arrives out of concern that additional countries may ban Huawei products putting the world’s second largest carrier in a tricky spot as it works to roll out 5G networks across the globe,

For now, the move is focused on European markets. As The Wall Street Journal notes, there remains some possibility that Vodafone could go forward with Huawei networking gear in other markets, including India, Turkey and parts of Africa. In Europe, however, these delays could ultimately work to raise the price and/or delay its planned 5G push.

“We have decided to pause further Huawei in our core whilst we engage with the various agencies and governments and Huawei just to finalize the situation, of which I feel Huawei is really open and working hard,” Vodafone CEO Nick Read said in a statement.

Huawei has continued to deny all allegations related to Chinese government spying.

A service that connects people to WiFi hotspots for free turned out to be one of China’s most popular apps, nestling in the top ranks with Tencent’s WeChat messenger and Alibaba’s digital wallet affiliate Alipay. According to a report from app tracking service App Annie, WiFi Master Key was China’s fifth-largest app and the world’s ninth largest by monthly active users in 2018, titles it also held in 2017.

The aptly-named WiFi Master Key, which owns the enviable domain wifi.com, is the product of a little-known startup called LinkSure in Shanghai that gets people onto the nearest wireless networks without the need for passwords. In addition, the app also recommends news and video content based on users’ past habits to lock them in, a feature similar to that of ByteDance’s algorithm-driven Jinri Toutiao news app.

Like many consumer-facing services in China, the app is free to use and monetizes traffic through advertising. It claims 700 million MAUs in China and another 100 million around the world. WeChat and Alipay, by comparison, each has around 1 billion MAUs worldwide.

The internet connectivity service helped LinkSure secure $52 million from a Series A round and value the parent at $1 billion back in 2015, only two years after the firm had launched. LinkSure has not announced further fundings since then and has kept a relatively low profile, though its founder Chen Danian was a household name from China’s early internet days. Along with his brother Chen Tianqiao, Chen founded Shanda Games, once China’s largest operator of online games before the rise of Tencent.

In November, Chen resigned as LinkSure’s chief operating officer as former Shanda executive Wang Jingying took over the reins to become one of the few prominent female CEOs in China’s tech sector.

Sharing passwords

The idea of freeloading on strangers’ networks strikes one as dodgy (or too good to be true), but the reality is more nuanced. WiFi Master Key keeps a database of passwords while encrypts and hides them from users, the company explains on its site. How does it collect all the credentials in the first place? Well, every time someone uses it to key in a login, the internet access app transmits that piece of information to the cloud. When people use it to, say, enter the WiFi passcode a barista just gave them, the data gets stored and shared to whoever at the cafe that uses the app.

Those inner workings enable the app to bill itself as a WiFi “sharing” service and distance itself from anything that’s remotely a hack. But its data practice still draws concerns over user privacy. Last April, the Chinese state television broadcaster ran a 25-minute feature lambasting the app for “stealing passwords.” That was followed by an industry-wide crackdown from the state’s cybersecurity watchdog on all WiFi crowdsourcing services with lacklustre security practices.

LinkSure rebuked the state report and said it always asked for user consent before gleaning their data. Chances are few people read the lengthy terms of use on any kind of apps in real life, and the less digital savvy may fail to grasp how the app actually works. A major source of debate is when users inadvertently make their house WiFi publicly available after giving the credentials away to a guest who happens to use the data ravenous app to access the host’s network. WiFi Master Key has not responded to emailed questions about its security practices.

Aside from enabling strangers to crowdsource WiFi, LinkSure has also joined hands with two major Chinese telecommunication companies to offer a separate broadband card with appealing data plans. That puts it in competition with Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu and other tech firms that are working with big telcos to provide cheap or unlimited data enticing people to use their in-house apps.

Meanwhile, LinkSure is eying to beam down its own internet connection from the space as SpaceX and OneWeb do. The plan is to target the next few billion rural users who are just coming online and live in areas currently uncovered by terrestrial networks. LinkSure says it’s aiming to provide free satellite network around the world by 2026, with the first out of a constellation of 272 satellites bound to launch later this year.

A government-backed report put the number of people with internet access in China at 802 million in June, leaving nearly 600 million who are still unconnected. 30 million people came online for the first time last year, including an expanding base of elderly users who are increasingly embracing Alipay and WeChat to go about daily lives.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week we had the gang back together with our own Connie Loizos at the helm, Kate Clark in the studio as well, Alex on the phone, and Ed Sim from Boldstart Ventures onboard as well. A good crew for a busy week.

Now that 2019 is fully underway, the news is back to its usual firehose-pace which means we had a lot to get through. In no overly serious order, here’s what we got to today on the show (you are subscribed, right?):

• The Pill Club raises $51 million: This Series B greatly expands The Pill Club’s total capital base, and puts more venture funds at work in women’s health. The service only launched in 2016, making its new round large compared to its age. But in the age of the huge early-stage round, The Pill Club’s round is hardly alone in its size for a Series B.
• More damn scooter news: There are more scooter companies than you thought, which are raising more money than you expected, and some giants are not as big as they had hoped to be. That’s a quick summary!
• Market fears: Domestically some venture capitalists are thinking more about bad deals that they dodged than good deals that they missed. That would be a change. And what’s going on in China is starting to feel a bit chillier than expected; it seems that the world’s hottest startup market is coming to terms with its own exuberance.
• A China slowdown? On that last point, China’s Q4 venture numbers were down year-over-year and also from the preceding quarter. It was a somewhat flop of an ending to a big year. The question now becomes how long the slowdown stays sticky.
• Munchery and the remains of munchies past: Kate looked into who isn’t getting paid after Munchery’s embarrassing flameout. The company lost around $125 million of its investors money, and, worse, has left many local companies unpaid. (Its investors should make those small businesses whole as they can afford it, and it’s the right thing to do. Here’s a list of those investors.)

And a few other things that we had to get to like Superhuman, Confluent, and various deserts.

his is the third calendar year of Equity, so thanks for sticking with us for so long. Hang tight, we’ll be right back!

French startup Lydia now lets you share your Lydia sub-accounts with other people. The company wants to make it easier to manage money when you’re traveling with friends, sharing an apartment with someone and more.

When Lydia introduced its premium offering back in March 2018, the company completely rethought the way Lydia accounts worked. Users had a single Lydia account and were basically limited to sending, receiving and withdrawing money — it was all about peer-to-peer payments. Now, you can create as many Lydia accounts as you want, move money around, set money aside and top up each account separately.

That was just the first step as you can now share those accounts with other people. This way, you don’t have to create a Splitwise group and track who owes what to whom. Instead of getting your money back after a while, people chip in and top up the shared account directly. Anybody can then safely spend that money.

As always, Lydia is all about getting money in the app and out of the app as seamlessly as possible. When you create a shared account, each user can top up the account using other Lydia sub-accounts, a traditional bank account that you have already connected to the app or a debit card if it’s a small amount.

If your bank account isn’t compatible with Lydia, you also get an IBAN number for this sub-account in particular. So you can initiate a traditional bank transfer from your bank account as well.

Once the account is up and running, anybody can spend money. You can generate a virtual card, add it to Apple Pay, Google Pay or Samsung Pay, and associate it with the shared account. If you’re on a ski trip and buying raclette cheese for your group of friends, you can then pay with your phone and debit the shared account.

If you’re a premium user and have a good old plastic Lydia card, you can also use it in any card reader and associate transactions with your shared account. Some websites already let you pay with your Lydia account directly as well. You can select your sub-account when confirming the transaction on your phone.

You can imagine multiple different use cases for such a feature. This is a good way to share an account with your significant other without switching to the same bank. This could be a way to pay for utility bills with your roommates.

“I use it with my son for instance. I created a shared account, I set up a virtual card and he added it to his Google Pay,” co-founder and CEO Cyril Chiche told me. He can then send him money that he can use instantly whenever he needs to.

This feature will become more valuable over time, when you can pay with your Lydia account in more places. Mobile payment systems, such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, are slowly becoming more widespread. And Lydia has also been working with popular payment service providers to add support for more e-commerce websites.

It’s a radical way of sharing expenses with friends and family members, but it could become the obvious way if Lydia becomes ubiquitous.

A blood-splattered Theranos machine nearly pricks an employee struggling to fix it. This gruesome graphical rendering is what you’ll walk away from HBO’s “The Inventor” with. It finally gives a visual to the startup’s laboratory fraud detailed in words by John Carreyrou’s book “Bad Blood”.

The documentary that premiered tonight at Sundance Film Festival explores how the move fast and break things ethos of Silicon Valley is “really dangerous when people’s lives are in the balance” as former employee and whistleblower Tyler Shultz says in the film. Theranos promised a medical testing device that made a single drop of blood from your finger more precise than a painful old-school syringe in your vein. What patients ended up using was so inaccurate it put their health in jeopardy.

But perhaps even more frightening is the willingness of Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes to delude herself and everyone around her in service of a seemingly benevolent mission. The documentary captures how good ideas can make people do bad things.

“The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley” juxtaposes truthful interviews with the employees who eventually rebelled against Holmes with footage and media appearances of her blatantly lying to the world. It manages to stick to the emotion of the story rather than getting lost in the scientific discrepancies of Theranos’ deception.

The film opens and closes with close-ups of Holmes, demonstrating how the facts change her same gleaming smile and big blue eyes from the face of innovative potential to that of a sociopathic criminal. “I don’t have many secrets” she tells the camera at the start.

Though the film mentions early that her $9 billion-plus valuation company would wind up worth less than zero, it does a keen job of building empathy for her that it can tear down later. You see her tell sob stories of death in the family and repeat her line about building an end to having to say goodbye to loved ones too soon. You hear how she’s terrified of needles and how growing up, “my best friends were books.”

But then cracks start to emerge as old powerful men from professors to former cabinet members faun over Holmes and become enthralled in her cult of personality as validation snowballs. Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney has a knack for creeping dread from his experience making “Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room” and “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.” He portrays Holmes’ delusions of grandeur with shots of her portrait beside those of Archimedes, Beethoven, and her idol Steve Jobs.

The first red flag comes when Holmes names her initial device Edison after the historic inventor the film assures you was quite a fraud himself. Soon, sources from inside the company relay how the Edison and subsequent Theranos hardware never worked right but that demos were faked for customers and investors. Instead of sticking to a firm timeline, Gibney bounces around to hammer home the emotional arcs of employees from excited to dubious, and of Holmes from confidence to paranoia.

Carreyrou’s “Bad Blood” meticulously chronicled every tiny warning sign that worried Theranos’ staff in order to build a case. But the author’s Wall Street Journal day job bled through, sapping the book of emotion and preventing it from seizing the grandeur of the tale’s climactic moments.

Gibney fills in the blanks with cringe-inducing scenes of Theranos’ faulty hardware. A ‘nanotainer’ of blood rolls off a table and fractures, a biohazard awaiting whoever tries to pick it up. The depiction of working in Theranos’ unregulated laboratory scored the biggest gasps from the Sundance audience. Former employees describe how Theranos recruited drifters they suspected of hepatitis as guinea pigs. Their stale blood evaporates into the air surrounding machines dripping with inky red, covered in broken test tubes. Gibney nails the graphics, zooming in on a needle spraying droplets as a robotic arm sputters through malfunctions. I almost had to look away as the film renders a hand reaching into the machine and only just dodging an erratic syringe.

At times, Gibney goes a bit too melodramatic. The toy music box twinkling foreshadows a dream becoming a nightmare, but it gets maddening after an hour straight. The pacing feels uneven, sometimes bogged down in Holmes’ personal relationships when later it seems to speed through the company’s collapse.

Though elsewhere, the director harnesses the nervous laughter coping mechanism of the former employees to inject humor into the grim tale. With accuracy so low, Shultz jokes that “if people are testing themselves for syphilis with Theranos, there’s going to be a lot more syphilis in the world.” Visual dramatizations of journalists’ audio recordings of Holmes and the eventual legal disputes bring this evidence to life.

The most touching scene sees Fortune’s Roger Parloff on the brink of implosion as he grapples with giving Holmes her first magazine cover story — momentum she used to eventually get Theranos’ useless hardware in front of real patients who depended on its results.

The Inventor succeeds at instilling the lesson without getting too preachy. It’s fine to be hopeful, but don’t ignore your concerns no matter how much you want something to be real. It takes an incredibly complex sequence of events and makes it at once gripping and informative. If you haven’t read “Bad Blood” or found it drab, “The Inventor” conveys the gravity of the debacle with a little more flare.

Yet the documentary also gives Holmes a bit too much benefit of the doubt, suggesting that hey, at least she was trying to do good in the world. In the after-film panel, Gibney said “She had a noble vision . . . I think that was part of why she was able to convince so many people and convince herself that what she was doing was great, which allowed her to lie so effectively.” Carreyrou followed up that “she was not intending to perpetrate a long con.”

Yet that’s easier to say for both the director and the author when neither of their works truly investigated the downstream health impacts of Theranos’ false positives and false negatives. If they’d tracked down people who delayed critical treatment or had their lives upended by the fear of a disease they didn’t have, I doubt Holmes would be cut so much slack.

Some degree of ‘Fake it ’til you make it’ might be essential to build hard technology startups. You must make people believe Inc something that doesn’t exist if you’re to pull in the funding and talent necessary to make it a reality. But it’s not just medical, hardware, or “atoms not bits” startups that must be allegiant to the truth. As Facebook and WhatsApps’ role in spreading misinformation that led to mob killings in India and Myanmar proved, having a grand mission doesn’t make you incapable of doing harm. A line must be drawn between optimism and dishonesty before it leads to drawing chalk outlines on the ground.

Southeast Asia-based ride-sharing firm Go-Jek is making progress with its plan to raise up to $2 billion in fresh capital to fund its battle with close rival Grab .

Indonesia-headquartered Go-Jek has closed an initial chunk of that round after a collection of existing investors, including Google, Tencent and JD.com, agreed to invest around $920 million towards it, three sources with knowledge of the investment told TechCrunch.

The deal, which we understand could be announced as soon as next week, will value Go-Jek’s business at around $9.5 billion, one source told TechCrunch. With existing investors on board, the company is now actively soliciting checks from other backers to take it to its target. The capital is likely to go towards deepening its presence in new markets and furthering its fintech push.

A Go-Jek representative declined to respond when contacted by TechCrunch for comment on its fundraising efforts.

This incoming round excluded, Go-Jek has raised more than $2 billion from investors to date, including a $1.4 billion round that closed last year and valued its business at $5 billion.

Founded in 2015, Go-Jek began in motorbike taxis before expanding to four-wheels, service on demand and fintech. It decided to go after a $2 billion raise last year — having seen Grab gobble up Uber’s local business in Southeast Asia — but it has taken some time to make progress. That’s partially down to an effort to ‘clean the cap table’ by buying out some early investors and longer-serving or former staff with equity, two sources told TechCrunch.

Likewise, there has also been discussion around including the acquisition of JD.com’s local JD.id business, valued at over $1 billion, in the deal. As far as we know, a resolution hasn’t been found despite lengthy talks.

An acquisition of JD.id would not only see JD.com’s influence deepen with Go-Jek, but it would give the ride-railing startup a strong position in Indonesia’s e-commerce space, which includes three other unicorns: Alibaba-owned Lazada, Tokopedia — which is backed by Alibaba and SoftBank’s Vision Fund — and Bukalapak, which also recently raised money for growth.

There is some doubt, however. Speaking to Reuters this week, co-founder Kevin Aluwi denied Go-Jek has plans to enter e-commerce.

Fundraising for Southeast Asia’s ride-sharing companies went up a few notches last year after Uber decided to exit the region through a deal with Grab, which saw the U.S. firm pick up a potentially-lucrative 27.5 percent stake in Singapore-based Grab.

Grab raised a $2 billion Series H round, anchored by a $1 billion injection from Toyota, but the company plans to increase that fundraising effort to as much as $5 billion, as we reported at the tail end of last year.

Why all the huge checks? At stake is a dominant position within a fast-growing online market.

Ride-hailing in Southeast Asia is poised to grow from an $8 billion annual business in 2018 to $31 billion by 2025, according to a report from Google and Temasek. Indonesia alone is tipped to account for nearly half of that figure.

With a cumulative population of more than 620 million people and increasing internet access, Southeast Asia has emerged from the shadows of China and India to become an attractive market for startups and tech companies. Chinese giants like Tencent and Alibaba have stepped up investment areas in recent years, with e-commerce, fintech and other ‘ground zero’ infrastructure services among their targets as the region begins to turn digital in the same way China has.

That’s where Grab and Go-Jek get interesting because, beyond simply catering to transportation, both companies have expanded to offer services on-demand, like e-groceries, as well as payments and financial services such as loans, remittance and insurance. The goal is to become the region’s one-stop ‘super app’ like WeChat, Alipay and Meituan in China.

So far, Go-Jek has fanned out beyond ride-hailing to offer fintech and other services in Indonesia, but it is still getting to grips with the regional play. It expanded to Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore last year while the Philippines is a work in progress following a setback after it was denied an operating permit earlier this month.

Already, though, it is making plans for the Philippines after it acquired Coins.ph, a fintech startup that is likely to be the base for a local push into payments and financial services. The deal was officially undisclosed, but sources told TechCrunch that Go-Jek has paid around $72 million — that potentially makes it the company’s largest acquisition to date. That shows how serious Go-Jek is both about its expansion efforts and its fintech business.

In the here and now, Go-Jek claims more than 125 million downloads in Indonesia, over a million drivers and some 300,000 food merchants. It claims to process 100 million transactions per month, while Aluwi told Reuters that total transactions on its platforms crossed $12.5 billion last year. That doesn’t mean net income, however, since the company takes only a slice of customer’s ride-sharing fares and payment volumes.

Grab, meanwhile, operates in eight markets in Southeast Asia. It claims over 130 million downloads and more than 2.5 billion completed rides to date. Grab is assumed to not yet be profitable but it has said that it made $1 billion in revenue in 2018. It projects that the figure will double this year.

The company has raised around $6.8 billion from investors, according to data from Crunchbase, and Grab was last valued at $11 billion.