Anthony Tan: How a Family Business Heir Built Grab by Rethinking the Taxi

Anthony Tan grew up with a future that was already mapped out. His family had built a major automotive business in Malaysia, and Tan was expected to play his part in that legacy. Instead, while studying at Harvard Business School, he became convinced that Southeast Asia’s deeply flawed taxi system represented an opportunity to build something of his own.

What began as MyTeksi, a modest taxi-booking service launched in Kuala Lumpur in 2012, eventually became Grab, one of Southeast Asia’s most important technology companies. Tan’s journey is a story about leaving a comfortable path, understanding a problem at ground level, and building a much larger business from a very specific human frustration.

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Key Takeaways

Anthony Tan left a secure family-business career to solve a problem he believed technology could address in Southeast Asia’s taxi industry.
Grab began as MyTeksi in Kuala Lumpur in 2012, built around improving safety, reliability, and efficiency for both passengers and drivers.
Tan expanded Grab far beyond ride-hailing by building an ecosystem spanning mobility, deliveries, payments, and financial services.
The company’s acquisition of Uber’s Southeast Asian operations in 2018 became a defining moment in Grab’s rise to regional dominance.
Tan remains Grab’s co-founder, CEO, and chairman, with majority voting control even as the company has evolved into a publicly traded technology platform.

The Family Business He Was Supposed to Inherit

Anthony Ping Yeow Tan was born in Kuala Lumpur in 1982 into one of Malaysia’s prominent business families. His father, Tan Heng Chew, was a senior leader of Tan Chong Motor Holdings, the automotive group associated with Nissan distribution and assembly in Malaysia.

The connection between Tan’s family and transportation went even further back. His great-grandfather had been a taxi driver before the family built its automotive business. That detail would eventually become more than an interesting piece of family history: it became part of the origin story of Grab.

Tan’s childhood included exposure to the family business from an early age. Rather than growing up completely removed from operations, he experienced aspects of the company from the ground up, including time around assembly operations and union activities. After graduating from the University of Chicago with a degree in economics and public policy, he joined Tan Chong and eventually worked in supply chain and marketing.

On paper, it was an enviable career path.

Tan, however, began to wonder whether the family business was actually the future he wanted.

That question became much harder to ignore when he went to Harvard Business School. There, he encountered entrepreneurship in a way that changed his understanding of what a career could look like. HBS describes him as someone who had already enjoyed an unusually secure professional trajectory before becoming increasingly interested in building something from scratch.

Then came the conversation that would change his life.

The Question That Became Grab

At Harvard, Tan was taking a class on business at the base of the pyramid when an Indonesian classmate challenged him about the state of Malaysia’s taxi industry.

The question was essentially unavoidable: if Tan’s family had spent generations involved in cars and transportation, why hadn’t someone fixed the problems surrounding taxis?

It hit a nerve.

The taxi system Tan encountered was inefficient and, more importantly, could feel unsafe. Women in particular had concerns about taking taxis alone. Drivers faced their own problems, including inefficient ways of finding passengers and earning a reliable income.

Tan had not set out to build a ride-hailing company. He had encountered a problem that was close enough to his own background that ignoring it became difficult.

He and fellow HBS student Tan Hooi Ling began developing a business plan for a mobile platform that could connect passengers with nearby taxi drivers. HBS records show that MyTeksi, founded by Anthony Tan, Hooi Ling Tan and Adeline Chan, was a runner-up in the school’s 2011 business venture competition.

The idea was simple.

Use mobile technology to make the taxi system work better.

The eventual business would be anything but simple.

Leaving the Safe Path

Building MyTeksi meant giving up a relatively secure future.

Tan’s decision was particularly difficult because his family did not initially embrace the idea. He was walking away from an established family enterprise to enter an uncertain startup market, and he did not have the luxury of knowing that ride-hailing would eventually become a multibillion-dollar industry.

HBS recounts that Tan’s family struggled to understand why he would abandon the established path at Tan Chong.

The early startup was also a long way from the polished technology company that Grab would become.

MyTeksi launched in June 2012. Tan and his team started from a small space in Kuala Lumpur, working with taxi drivers and trying to convince a traditional industry to adopt a new way of operating.

That meant spending time outside the office.

Tan has repeatedly emphasized the importance of understanding the driver’s experience rather than designing the product exclusively from a passenger’s perspective. His early philosophy was straightforward: if you want to improve transportation, you need to understand the people actually doing the driving.

That approach helped shape one of the defining characteristics of Grab’s business model: the company was not simply trying to replace taxi drivers with technology. It was trying to give them better tools.

This distinction mattered.

From MyTeksi to Grab

The company quickly discovered that the opportunity was much larger than Malaysia.

MyTeksi expanded across Southeast Asia, eventually becoming GrabTaxi and later simply Grab. By 2015, the company had attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and had become one of Southeast Asia’s best-funded startups. Grab itself described its 2015 funding round as bringing total funding to approximately $700 million.

The company’s geographic expansion also changed the nature of Tan’s job.

He was no longer simply building a Malaysian taxi application. He was attempting to create a regional technology platform across countries with different languages, regulations, transportation systems, consumer habits and economic conditions.

That required a distinctly Southeast Asian strategy.

Rather than assuming that a Silicon Valley model could simply be copied across the region, Grab developed a more localized approach. It moved into motorcycles, food delivery, payments, groceries and other services, gradually turning the original transportation product into a broader consumer ecosystem.

GrabPay was an important part of that transition. Financial services later became another major pillar, including digital banking initiatives.

The logic was cumulative.

A customer who already used Grab for transportation could potentially use it for food. That customer could pay through GrabPay, order groceries, access financial services and interact with other parts of the platform.

The taxi problem had become a platform.

The Uber Moment

Grab’s most consequential competitive moment came in 2018, when it acquired Uber’s Southeast Asian operations.

The deal effectively removed one of its most important regional competitors while giving Uber a significant stake in Grab. But it also created regulatory consequences.

Singapore’s Competition and Consumer Commission concluded that the transaction substantially lessened competition in the country’s ride-hailing market and imposed measures and financial penalties on the parties.

The episode remains an important part of Tan’s founder story because it illustrates the reality of building a dominant platform: scale can create enormous advantages, but it also attracts scrutiny.

For Tan, the acquisition transformed Grab’s competitive position. The company emerged as the dominant regional player and continued expanding beyond transportation.

That expansion ultimately led Grab toward its 2021 Nasdaq listing.

Building Beyond Ride-Hailing

One of the most interesting aspects of Tan’s journey is that he did not treat ride-hailing as the destination.

The original problem was transportation. But once Grab had millions of consumers and a large network of drivers and merchants, Tan had something potentially more valuable: an ecosystem.

That ecosystem could solve other problems.

Payments could make transactions easier and reduce the amount of cash drivers carried. Food delivery could use the same consumer and driver infrastructure. Financial services could address gaps affecting consumers and informal workers.

Tan has described this evolution as being connected to the original mission around safety and inclusion. Grab’s own account of his leadership describes the company’s expansion from transportation into payments and digital financial services as an extension of that broader philosophy.

This is an important distinction in understanding Tan as a founder.

He did not begin with a grand plan to build a superapp.

He built one useful service, developed trust and distribution, and then used that infrastructure to solve adjacent problems.

The Public Company Test

Grab’s 2021 Nasdaq debut was a landmark moment for Southeast Asian technology.

It also introduced a different kind of pressure.

The company went public through a SPAC transaction at a headline valuation of roughly $40 billion, but its stock subsequently traded well below those initial expectations. That experience highlighted a familiar problem for technology companies that spend years prioritizing growth: public markets eventually demand evidence that scale can translate into durable economics.

Tan has had to lead Grab through that transition.

And there are signs that the company has entered a different phase.

Grab reported its first full year of net profit for 2025. In the fourth quarter of that year, revenue reached $906 million, up 19% year over year, while monthly transacting users surpassed 50 million.

The momentum continued into 2026. Grab reported second-quarter revenue of $997 million, up 22% year over year, while profit for the period reached $235 million. Monthly transacting users increased to 53.9 million.

Those numbers represent a significant change from the company’s earlier years, when the central question was how quickly Grab could expand.

The question now is how effectively it can turn that enormous regional footprint into sustainable profitability and new growth.

Tan Still Controls the Company He Built

Tan’s influence has not diminished simply because Grab became a public company.

In fact, its dual-class share structure gives him significant voting power. In March 2026, Grab shareholders approved an amendment increasing the voting power of each Class B share from 45 votes to 90 votes. The resolution passed with 85.9% of votes cast in favor.

Grab continues to describe itself as founder-led, with Tan retaining majority voting rights. As of 2026, he remains Group CEO, co-founder and chairman.

That structure gives Tan something many founders lose after going public: the ability to maintain significant influence over the company’s long-term direction.

It also makes his role unusual.

He is simultaneously the founder who created the original vision, the CEO responsible for execution, and the chairman overseeing the board.

Grab has nevertheless emphasized independent governance. Following the departure of Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi from its board in July 2026, Grab said four of its six directors were independent.

For Tan, the structure means that the founder story is still being written from inside the company rather than from the sidelines.

What Anthony Tan’s Founder Journey Teaches

Tan’s story offers several lessons for entrepreneurs.

The first is that personal proximity to a problem can be an advantage. Tan did not discover transportation as an abstract market opportunity. His family history, his own experiences and the concerns of people around him made the problem tangible.

The second is that a simple starting point can lead to a much larger opportunity. MyTeksi was fundamentally a taxi-booking service. Tan did not need to predict the entire superapp economy in 2012. He needed to make one part of the transportation system work better.

The third is that distribution can become more valuable than the original product. Once Grab built a large network of users, drivers and merchants, the company could introduce entirely new services on top of that infrastructure.

The fourth is that regional businesses require regional thinking. Southeast Asia is not one homogeneous market. Grab’s growth required navigating different countries, regulators, consumer behaviors and transportation systems.

Finally, Tan’s story demonstrates that founders sometimes have to leave the obvious path before they know where the alternative will lead.

He started with considerable advantages: education, family connections and access to capital. But none of those things guaranteed that MyTeksi would survive. The critical decision was still his willingness to leave the expected career and build something that initially looked much smaller and riskier.

From Taxi Problem to Regional Platform

Anthony Tan’s most compelling founder story is not that he built one of Southeast Asia’s largest technology companies.

It is that he started with a problem that was almost embarrassingly ordinary.

People needed safer, more reliable taxis. Drivers needed a better way to find passengers. Tan understood both sides of that problem, partly because transportation had been part of his family’s history for generations.

The company that emerged from that insight eventually became much larger than transportation.

Grab now operates across mobility, deliveries and financial services, and in 2026 announced plans to acquire foodpanda’s Taiwan delivery business for $600 million, subject to regulatory approval. The proposed transaction would give Grab its ninth market and its first outside Southeast Asia.

That expansion illustrates how far the company has traveled from the storage-room startup Tan launched in Kuala Lumpur.

But the underlying founder logic remains recognizable.

Find something people struggle with. Understand the problem better than the competition. Build around the people who actually use the product. Then expand only when the original platform gives you a credible reason to do so.

Tan did not set out to build Grab.

He set out to fix the taxi.

And that may be the most useful lesson in his entire founder journey.

FAQs

Who is Anthony Tan?

Anthony Tan is the co-founder, Group CEO and chairman of Grab, the Southeast Asian technology company that began as a taxi-booking service in Malaysia. He has led the company since its founding in 2012.

How did Anthony Tan start Grab?

Tan developed the original business concept while studying at Harvard Business School with fellow students Tan Hooi Ling and Adeline Chan. Their MyTeksi business plan was a runner-up in HBS’s 2011 business venture competition, and the company launched in Malaysia in 2012.

Why did Anthony Tan leave his family’s business?

Tan had been working at Tan Chong Group, his family’s automotive business, but became interested in entrepreneurship while studying at Harvard Business School. The opportunity to address problems in Malaysia’s taxi industry ultimately convinced him to pursue a startup rather than continue along the expected family-business path.

What does Grab do today?

Grab has expanded beyond its original ride-hailing business into deliveries, payments and financial services. By 2026, the company was operating as a broader technology platform serving more than 50 million monthly transacting users.

Is Anthony Tan still CEO of Grab?

Yes. As of 2026, Tan remains Grab’s Group CEO, co-founder and chairman. He also retains majority voting rights through Grab’s dual-class share structure.

Conclusion

Anthony Tan’s journey from a Malaysian family business to the founder’s seat at Grab is ultimately a story about choosing an uncertain problem over a certain future. He began with taxis, but the bigger achievement was recognizing that solving one everyday problem could create the trust, distribution and infrastructure needed to solve many others.

Grab’s next chapter will be different from its startup years. With the company now profitable, publicly traded and expanding into new markets, Tan is no longer simply proving that his original idea can work. He is responsible for proving that the platform he built can continue creating value at regional scale.

That is a very different founder challenge – and one that Anthony Tan is still leading himself.

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