Grab announces acquisition of Bangalore payments startup iKaaz

The acquisition will facilitate Grab's turn to become the region's favourite consumer internet platform

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The rich functionality of iKaaz’s mobile payments platform and its experienced leadership team will accelerate the feature development and partner integration of GrabPay, Grab’s payments platform. Already Southeast Asia’s #1 ride-hailing platform, Grab is expanding across all markets in Southeast Asia in 2018, with the goal of becoming the region’s universal payments platform.

Launched in 2014, iKaaz’s technology was built to work in India’s challenging internet conditions and enable effortless and fast payments for thousands of merchants. Ikaaz’s technology stack encompasses a range of innovations, such as NFC, QR-code, audio-based payments, as well as bill payments, online payments, and P2P. This flexibility and scalability make it ideally suited for Southeast Asia’s diverse payments landscape and large unbanked population.

“iKaaz’s technology has served merchants and partners across different industries and in different settings, from parking lots and airports to retail stores and hotels. This rich set of offline payments features offers the flexibility needed to tailor our GrabPay platform to each country and partner in Southeast Asia. We look forward to leveraging the expertise of iKaaz’s leadership team and build GrabPay into SEA’s universal payments platform together,” said Jason Thompson, managing director of GrabPay Southeast Asia.

Following the completion of the acquisition, the Ikaaz team will join Grab’s Bangalore R&D centre, adding valuable experience and knowledge. The iKaaz leadership team brings on board experience from respected payment startups, such as Nokia Money and Obopay.

“Our team has worked tirelessly to bring more people into the cashless economy. We are proud of the product we built and how it has enabled safe and easy mobile transactions for thousands of merchants. By partnering with Grab, we now have an opportunity to see how our tech can improve the lives of Southeast Asia’s more than 620 million people and its growing digital economy,” added Soma Sundaram, founder of iKaaz.

As Grab continues to transform from Southeast Asia’s largest on-demand transportation platform into the region’s No.1 consumer internet platform, GrabPay has seen explosive growth in its services. Today, the Grab platform already facilitates more than 3.5 million transactions a day and over a billion transactions per year.

Grab’s Bangalore R&D centre, one of six across the globe, serves as a centre of excellence for payments. First opened in March 2017, it has continued to rapidly expand. In November, the centre added Vikas Agrawal, former senior vice president of Engineering at PayTM, as CTO for GrabPay. The Bangalore R&D centre currently counts 75 engineers, with Grab planning to hire 200 engineers in total by the end of 2018.