SINGAPORE: Southeast Asian ride-hailing company Grab on Thursday said it has secured new investment of $1 billion from a clutch of financial firms, including global asset manager OppenheimerFunds and China’s Ping An Capital.
The funding comes after Toyota Motor Corp. in June bought a $1 billion stake in Grab as the lead investor in a financing round launched following Grab’s acquisition of Uber Technologies Inc’s operations in Southeast Asia.
Grab said other investors in the new funding include Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, Macquarie Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Six-year-old Grab, which counts Chinese ride-hailing firm Didi Chuxing and Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. among its backers, was valued at just more than $10 billion after Toyota’s investment, a source familiar with the matter said at the time.
Grab, which started as a taxi-booking app, has been transforming itself into a consumer technology group, offering services such as digital payments and food delivery.
Earlier this year, Uber sold its Southeast Asian business to Grab in exchange for a stake in the Singapore-based firm, in a deal that has prompted regulatory scrutiny.
Grab said it would use the new funds to expand its online-to-offline services in Southeast Asia.
It plans to use a significant portion of the proceeds to invest in Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s biggest market where Go-Jek is the dominant player in ride-hailing.
Go-Jek counts Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings Ltd., private equity firms KKR & Co., Warburg Pincus and venture capital player Sequoia Capital among its investors.
Southeast Asia’s Grab mops up $1 billion funding from financial firms
Southeast Asia’s Grab mops up $1 billion funding from financial firms
Work suspended on Riyadh’s massive Mukaab megaproject: Reuters
RIYADH: Saudi Arabia has suspended planned construction of a colossal cube-shaped skyscraper at the center of a downtown development in Riyadh while it reassesses the project's financing and feasibility, four people familiar with the matter said.
The Mukaab was planned as a 400-meter by 400-meter metal cube containing a dome with an AI-powered display, the largest on the planet, that visitors could observe from a more than 300-meter-tall ziggurat — or terraced structure —inside it.
Its future is now unclear, with work beyond soil excavation and pilings suspended, three of the people said. Development of the surrounding real estate is set to continue, five people familiar with the plans said.
The sources include people familiar with the project's development and people privy to internal deliberations at the PIF.
Officials from PIF, the Saudi government and the New Murabba project did not respond to Reuters requests for comment.
Real estate consultancy Knight Frank estimated the New Murabba district would cost about $50 billion — roughly equivalent to Jordan’s GDP — with projects commissioned so far valued at around $100 million.
Initial plans for the New Murabba district called for completion by 2030. It is now slated to be completed by 2040.
The development was intended to house 104,000 residential units and add SR180 billion to the Kingdom’s GDP, creating 334,000 direct and indirect jobs by 2030, the government had estimated previously.
(With Reuters)
