GrabTaxi, Uber’s Asian competitor, to set up a Seattle base

GrabTaxi, the on-demand ride service and Uber competitor in South-east Asia, is opening a technology centre in Seattle, marking the company's first physical presence in the US. The company announced yesterday that the new centre will work on cloud computing and data projects to support the smartphone app its customers use to hail rides in a car or motorbike. While the Seattle centre is GrabTaxi's first physical presence in the US, it is worth bearing in mind that the company has a budding relationship with San Francisco on-demand ride service, Lyft. The two are part of a ride-hailing coalition created last month that also includes China-based Didi Kuaidi and India-based Ola, which allows passengers to use all of the platforms to hail a ride as they travel between the US and Asia.

GrabTaxi, the largest ride-hail service in Southeast Asia, is opening an engineering center in Seattle in a bid to improve its mobile platform by taking advantage of the deep pool of tech talent in that city, the company announced Wednesday.

The new center will be run by Raman Narayanan, a former Microsoft "Distinguished Engineer." But GrabTaxi, which currently operates in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand, insists it has no plans to launch its service in the US, where the market is already controlled by Uber and Lyft.

"We see plenty of opportunity in Southeast Asia."

"We see plenty of opportunity in Southeast Asia and are focused on services in our local markets where we have familiarity with local needs," said Arul Kumaravel, VP of engineering and formerly Head of engineering for Amazon's mobile platform, in an email to The Verge.

Kumaravel explained why the company's decision to open a tech hub in Seattle was significant: "The types of technical challenges that we are addressing now compared to our earlier days are very different. We've moved on from solving individual inefficiencies and are now working on more complex aspects of the technology like predictive analytics to forecast demand and supply in specific areas."

Despite self-driving technology that's all the rage among its competitors, GrabTaxi's engineering team won't be tackling similar research, Narayanan explained. "In Southeast Asia where GrabTaxi operates, many cities are still developing infrastructure such as detailed mapping data, which is necessary for self-driving vehicles to operate effectively," he said. "So I would say that SDVs are currently more relevant to the developed markets."

Still the announcement from GrabTaxi, which is involved in a global partnership with two other Asian ride-hail companies, China's Didi Kuaidi and India's Ola, as well as Lyft, is a sign of the growing power of the Eastern Hemisphere's ride-hail industry. It's especially noteworthy, given the fact that Uber has targeted India and China for its next expansion project.