This story is part of Forbes’ coverage of Asia’s Power Business Women 2019. See the full list here.
Tan Hooi Ling is the cofounder of Southeast Asia’s first decacorn, super app Grab. The 35-year-old Harvard MBA has led the company with cofounder Anthony Tan in raising over $9 billion dollars since launching in 2012.
Nearly half of that sum came in March when the Singapore-based startup raised $4.5 billion in a funding round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund, Alibaba, Microsoft and 26 other investors, valuing the company at $14 billion. This Series H round aims to raise another $2 billion before the end of the year.
As chief operating officer, Tan focuses on growing market share in the eight countries and 336 cities where Grab operates. In March 2018, Grab bought Uber’s Southeast Asian operations in a deal worth “several billion dollars,” according to San Francisco-based Uber. As part of the deal, Uber got a 27.5% stake, and its CEO Dara Khosrowshahi gained a board seat in Grab. The acquisition, and Grab’s own expansion efforts, helped it boost its market share in Indonesia—Southeast Asia’s largest market—above 60% (by number of rides) in mid-2018 from just 30% in early 2017, according to New York-based ABI Research.
Tan’s civil engineering father inspired her to study mechanical engineering at the University of Bath in the UK. After a year as an equipment engineer at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly in London, Tan moved to consulting firm McKinsey back home in Malaysia, which eventually sponsored her for an M.B.A. from Harvard. There she met Grab cofounder Anthony Tan in the class of 2011. Although she took a job with Salesforce in San Francisco after graduation, she spent her spare time developing Grab with Anthony Tan, even using her holidays to go to Kuala Lumpur to build the team.
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Tan aims to strengthen Grab’s foothold in the $25 billion market for on-demand transport, and capture part of the $500 billion payments market in Asia. In Singapore, Grab is vying for one of five digital banking licenses to be issued by the Monetary Authority for the first time this year. Fintech arm Grab Financial Group wants users of the Grab app—downloaded over 152 million times—to adopt its e-wallet; as well as sell them loans, mortgages and insurance.
In 2018, Grab partnered with Japan’s Credit Saison to provide lending services, and partnered with Mastercard for prepaid services. Beyond fintech, Tan is courting other service verticals including video services, travel booking and healthcare, which it wants to sell across Southeast Asia.
