In order to ramp up its competitiveness in the region, Southeast Asian ride-hailing app Grab is establishing new research and development centers in Vietnam and India.
According to Tech Crunch, the two new engineering centers in Saigon and Bangalore, India will be the fifth and sixth such locations worldwide. Grab also unveiled another center in Jakarta, Indonesia last month.
The Saigon-based research and development center will focus on coming up with localized improvements to the company’s services, while the Bangalore center’s main task is to work on payment services.
At this stage, Grab’s Saigon center will start with a team of 25 people. Its Jakarta and Bangalore counterparts will hire 150 and 200 employees, respectively. The ride-hailing service shared that in the next two years, it plans to add around 800 new research and development jobs across its centers in Beijing, Bangalore, Jakarta, Saigon, Singapore and Seattle.
“The opening of the R&D center here is a nod to Vietnam emerging as one of the hot spots for tech talent in the region,” head of Grab Vietnam Jerry Lim said in a press release. “Southeast Asia is developing at a breakneck pace and we have an unprecedented opportunity to deliver a platform that caters to the region’s mobile-first environment and infrastructural needs.”
Currently, Grab employs some 710,000 drivers in 39 cities across six Southeast Asian countries. The app has been downloaded as many as 36 million times across all mobile platforms.
[Photo via Vulcan Post]
