Anthony Tan

Anthony Tan
Born	1982 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Nationality	Singaporean
Education	University of Chicago (B.A., 2004); Harvard Business School (MBA, 2011)
Occupation	Businessman
Company	Grab Holdings Limited
Title	Founder, Chairman and Group Chief Executive Officer
Net worth	US$790 million (Forbes, August 2021)
Spouse	Chloe Tong
Children	4 (as of 2021)

Anthony Tan Ping Yeow (born 1982) is a Singaporean businessman. He is the founder, chairman and group chief executive officer of Grab Holdings Limited, a Nasdaq listed technology company headquartered in Singapore that operates ride hailing, food and grocery delivery, and digital financial services across Southeast Asia. Born in Kuala Lumpur to a family that controlled the Malaysian automotive group Tan Chong Motor, Tan gave up an expected place in the family business to co-found a taxi booking application, MyTeksi, with his Harvard Business School classmate Tan Hooi Ling in 2012. The company relocated its base to Singapore, was renamed Grab in 2016, and grew into what several outlets described as Southeast Asia's most valuable start up.

Tan led Grab through its acquisition of Uber's Southeast Asian operations in March 2018, its expansion into an "everyday super app" offering deliveries, payments and lending, and its listing on the Nasdaq stock exchange in December 2021 through what was then the largest merger with a special purpose acquisition company on record. Grab's early years as a public company were marked by heavy losses and a falling share price, but the company reported its first full year of net profit in 2025. As of the company's March 2026 annual report, Tan continues to serve as founder, chairman and chief executive, and in July 2026 he joined more than 40 other executives as a founding member of the AI for Good Global Commission.

Tan is married to Chloe Tong, with whom he has at least four children as of 2021, and became a Singapore citizen in 2016 after moving Grab's headquarters there. In November 2023, Grab faced a consumer boycott in Indonesia and Malaysia after an Instagram post by Tong about a family trip to Israel resurfaced during the war in Gaza.

Early life and education

Tan was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 1982, into a family whose business, Tan Chong Motor, assembled and distributed Nissan vehicles across Southeast Asia. His father, Tan Heng Chew, is a senior executive in the family's automotive group; Grab's own regulatory filings describe him as "Dato Tan Heng Chew, Mr. Anthony Tan's father" and identify Tan Chong Consolidated Sdn Bhd, wholly owned by members of the Tan family, as a continuing related party of the company Tan later founded. Speaking to the Financial Times in 2021, the venture capitalist Jixun Foo recalled that when he first met Tan, Tan explained that his drive came from his grandfather's history as a taxi driver who had gone on to build his own business. A 2017 profile in The Peak Malaysia named that grandfather as Tan Sri Tan Yuet Foh, a co-founder of Tan Chong Motors, and reported that the family impressed frugality on Tan, who told the magazine that "money is hard to earn and easy to throw away".

As a child, Tan showed an early interest in commerce. At the age of six, asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said "I want to be a businessman", and at eleven he ran his first venture, trading X-Men comic books for cash at a comics convention and gradually expanding his stock.

Tan attended the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, earning a Bachelor of Arts with honours in economics and public policy in 2004. He later attended Harvard Business School, where he received a Master of Business Administration in 2011. Forbes has written that Tan "could have had an easy ride with his family's auto business, run by his father, Tan Heng Chew, but in 2012 he struck out on his own."

Career

Family business and the idea for Grab (2004 to 2011)

After completing his undergraduate degree, Tan worked within the Tan Chong Motor group, the family business he was expected to eventually run. While at Harvard Business School he was drawn to entrepreneurship after encounters with technology founders, including YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, and the idea for a ride booking company grew out of frustration with the standard of Malaysia's taxi services. Tan partnered with classmate Tan Hooi Ling, and together with fellow student Adeline Chan the pair developed a business plan to make taxis safer and easier to book in Malaysia; the plan was named runner up at the Harvard Business School New Venture Competition in 2011 and won $25,000 in prize money.

Founding MyTeksi and building GrabTaxi (2012 to 2016)

Using the competition prize money, personal savings and an investment from his mother, Tan and Tan Hooi Ling launched MyTeksi in Kuala Lumpur in June 2012. The service grew quickly in its early Malaysian market: by 2013 it had signed up about 2,500 drivers across four cities and was receiving a new booking roughly every eight seconds. The company expanded into Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines under the name GrabTaxi, and by 2014 had made Singapore its operational base. In August 2015, backed by investors including Japan's SoftBank and Singapore's state investment firm Temasek Holdings, the company raised $350 million and passed a $1 billion valuation, becoming one of the region's first "unicorn" start ups; in 2016 it adopted the shorter name Grab to reflect a widening range of services beyond taxi booking. Tan became a citizen of Singapore in 2016 as the company's centre of operations shifted there.

By July 2018, Grab's operations had grown to occupy two floors at Marina One West in Singapore's downtown business district, a considerable change from the company's beginnings in a cramped garage in Kuala Lumpur. Speaking to the South China Morning Post, Tan recalled travelling to the Philippines in Grab's early years to persuade a local taxi fleet operator to join the platform, only to realise partway through the meeting, after hearing a loud thud beneath the table, that he was negotiating with one of the region's arms dealers. At that point, Forbes estimated Tan's personal fortune at around $300 million, a figure made before Grab's next round of fundraising.

The Uber acquisition and the super app strategy (2017 to 2019)

Grab's expansion in the region brought it into direct competition with Uber, which had entered Southeast Asia shortly after Grab's founding, and with Gojek, the Indonesian ride hailing company co-founded by Tan's Harvard classmate Nadiem Makarim. In March 2018, Grab acquired Uber's Southeast Asian ride hailing and food delivery operations, ending years of costly competition between the two companies in the region. Months later, Grab set out its ambition to become Southeast Asia's first "everyday super app," expanding from ride hailing into food and grocery delivery, digital payments, micro insurance and lending. Shareholders in Grab and Gojek later held talks about a possible merger of the two rivals, but discussions stalled over how much control Tan would retain.

Pandemic losses and the Nasdaq listing (2020 to 2021)

The COVID-19 pandemic hit Grab's ride hailing business hard: according to a filing made by Altimeter Growth Corp, the blank check company that later merged with Grab, the value of ride hailing transactions fell 43 per cent in 2020 from the year before. In June 2020, Tan announced job cuts affecting about 5 per cent of the workforce, or 360 roles, at a company town hall. According to a former employee's account, Tan, reading from a prepared note, told staff "I did not want to do this at all. It's the last resort," and became visibly emotional during the meeting.

In April 2021, Grab announced it would list on the Nasdaq stock exchange through a merger with Altimeter Growth Corp, a deal reported at the time to value the combined company at about $35 billion. The transaction was delayed from an initially planned close in July 2021 to December 2021 so that Grab's financial records could be audited. When the merger closed on 2 December 2021, it was described as the largest SPAC merger completed to that date; Grab raised $4.5 billion in the deal, and its shares opened trading at $13.06, briefly making Tan a paper billionaire.

Life as a public company (2022 to 2026)

Grab's first earnings report as a public company, covering the quarter ended 31 December 2021, showed net losses had widened by 73 per cent to $1.1 billion; for the full year 2021, losses widened by 30 per cent to $3.56 billion, and Grab's shares fell 37 per cent to a then record low of $3.28 after the results were announced. In January 2021 Grab had announced the acquisition of Jaya Grocer, a Malaysian supermarket chain, a deal that closed in early 2022. By the quarter ended March 2022, Grab's losses had narrowed to $435 million as user spending on the platform recovered.

Grab continued to expand its business through acquisitions in the following years. In March 2025, it acquired Everrise, a Malaysian supermarket chain, and in December 2025 it acquired Infermove, an artificial intelligence robotics start up based in China. In June 2025, Grab issued $1.5 billion in zero coupon convertible senior notes due 2030 to institutional investors, priced at a conversion premium of about 40 per cent above the $4.68 closing price of its shares on 10 June 2025. In February 2026, having substantially completed an earlier buyback programme, Grab's board authorised a new share repurchase programme of up to $500 million. Grab reported its first full year of net profit in 2025, a $200 million profit compared with net losses of $158 million in 2024 and $485 million in 2023. As of the company's annual report filed in March 2026, Tan Hooi Ling, Tan's co-founder, no longer holds any position at Grab, and Alex Hungate serves as president and chief operating officer, a post he has held since joining the company in January 2022.

Leadership and management style

Colleagues and investors have described Tan as intensely driven. A lawyer whose firm works for Grab told the Financial Times that "Anthony always wants to be number one. He is the guy in Seat 1A and the first one off the plane," while a former Grab employee, Gregory Van, called him "a street fighter." Tan has said he has little time for leisure; discussing the film Invictus in 2019, he said he found its account of Nelson Mandela's leadership "inspiring" but admitted he had only watched the first 38 minutes, saying "I don't have time to watch movies," and adding "I don't need breaks because to me [the job] is a break." Asked about work-life balance in 2017, Tan said "I don't even know what that means" and "I don't see a need to switch off", describing his approach instead as integrating family into working life, including keeping a baby cot in his office. Former Grab president Ming Maa, who took a pay cut to join the company in 2016, said of Tan's work habits, "I learnt how to use a laptop on a treadmill from Anthony."

Tan has cited Jesus Christ as one of his leadership role models and has described becoming a "Christ centred disciple" after meeting Andy Mills, the former chief executive of Thomson Financial and a Grab board member, at Harvard; Tan has said Mills guided him "as a mentor, as a big brother in my work, in my faith in God." He has also named SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son, an early Grab investor, as another leadership influence. Employees have nicknamed him "AT." During the 2020 pandemic layoffs, former employees described morale inside the company as low; one told Business Insider that "everyone knew someone who was laid off," and that staff did not know what would happen to the company next.

Major deals and strategic decisions

The defining strategic decisions of Tan's career have been Grab's pivot from a single product taxi booking app to a multi service "super app," and its consolidation of competitors in Southeast Asia's ride hailing market. The acquisition of Uber's Southeast Asian operations in March 2018 removed Grab's largest regional rival and was followed months later by the company's public statement of intent to become an "everyday super app." Not every product bet succeeded: during the pandemic, Grab employees floated a massage booking service inspired by a similar, since discontinued offering from Gojek, but the idea, internally nicknamed "GrabMassage," was dropped because, according to one person involved, "the optics weren't that great."

Grab's 2021 Nasdaq listing through its merger with Altimeter Growth Corp was, at the time, the largest completed merger involving a special purpose acquisition company, raising $4.5 billion for the combined business. Subsequent acquisitions broadened Grab beyond transport and delivery into groceries and enterprise technology: Jaya Grocer (announced January 2021, closed early 2022) and Everrise (March 2025) added supermarket chains in Malaysia, while the December 2025 purchase of the Chinese artificial intelligence robotics start up Infermove signalled an interest in automation technology. In June 2025, Grab raised $1.5 billion through zero coupon convertible notes due 2030, and in February 2026 its board authorised a new $500 million share buyback programme after substantially completing an earlier one.

Grab's regulatory filings also disclose continuing commercial ties to Tan's family business. On 31 December 2024, Grab subsidiary GrabCar Sdn Bhd awarded a contract, via competitive bidding, to purchase 281 units of the Perodua Bezza car model for 4.7 million Malaysian ringgit (about $1.1 million) from MUV Marketplace Sdn Bhd, a company majority owned by Tan Chong Consolidated Sdn Bhd, which is wholly owned by members of the Tan family, including Tan's father.

Financial and market performance

Grab trades on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the ticker GRAB, with its warrants trading under GRABW. The company's revenue grew from $2.36 billion in 2023 to $2.80 billion in 2024 and $3.37 billion in 2025, growth rates of 19 per cent and 20 per cent respectively. Deliveries remained Grab's largest segment, with revenue of $1.8 billion in 2025 compared with $1.49 billion in 2024, while mobility revenue rose to $1.22 billion from $1.05 billion and financial services revenue rose to $347 million from $253 million over the same period. On demand gross merchandise value, the total value of transactions on Grab's platforms, grew from $15.8 billion in 2023 to $18.4 billion in 2024 and $22.1 billion in 2025. Group adjusted EBITDA, a non IFRS measure, improved from a loss of $22 million in 2023 to a profit of $313 million in 2024 and $500 million in 2025. Monthly transacting users grew from 35.5 million in 2023 to 41.3 million in 2024 and 47.2 million in 2025. Grab recorded its first full year of net profit in 2025, at $200 million, after net losses of $158 million in 2024 and $485 million in 2023; despite this, the company reported accumulated losses of $17.5 billion as of 31 December 2025, reflecting more than a decade of cash intensive growth.

Grab's share price fell sharply in its early months as a public company. Shares opened at $13.06 on the day the SPAC merger closed in December 2021 but closed at just $8.75 by the end of that first day of trading. After the company's first earnings report as a public company revealed widening losses, the stock fell 37 per cent to a then record low of $3.28. By June 2022 the shares were trading at $2.66. The share price later recovered: the weighted average fair value used for employee restricted stock unit grants rose from $2.90 in 2023 to $3.21 in 2024 and $4.50 in 2025, and Grab's shares closed at $4.68 on 10 June 2025, the reference price for that month's convertible notes offering. As of 31 December 2025, Grab had total outstanding indebtedness of $1.8 billion, including $1.5 billion of convertible notes, and had 12,012 full time employees, plus 1,242 fixed term contract staff and 3,956 temporary agency workers, up from a workforce that included 865 employees who joined through the Everrise acquisition and 22 through the Infermove acquisition. In 2025, Grab paid an aggregate of $7 million in cash compensation and benefits in kind to its directors and executive officers as a group.

Board memberships and outside roles

Tan chairs Grab's seven member board of directors, whose independent directors include former Uber chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi, a relationship that has continued since Uber sold its Southeast Asian operations to Grab in exchange for an equity stake in 2018. As of a beneficial ownership filing dated 31 January 2026, Tan held 131,835,048 Class B ordinary shares of Grab, representing about 3.2 per cent of the company's total ordinary shares but, because of the higher voting rights attached to Class B shares, about 59.9 per cent of total voting power. In July 2026, Tan joined more than 40 other executives as a founding member of the AI for Good Global Commission, an initiative co-chaired by Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Salesforce chair Marc Benioff that aims to expand digital access and involve developing countries in the development of artificial intelligence; its inaugural meeting was held at the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva from 7 to 10 July 2026, alongside Singapore's Minister for Digital Development and Information, Josephine Teo.

Controversies

In November 2023, Grab faced a wave of app deletions and subscription cancellations in Indonesia and Malaysia after an Instagram post by Tan's wife, Chloe Tong, resurfaced online. Tong had posted the story in July 2023 during a family trip to Israel, writing that she had fallen "completely in love" with the country; the post drew renewed attention after the start of the war in Gaza that October, and was shared alongside a wider, unverified list of more than 100 brands that boycott organisers claimed were affiliated with Israel. Those cancelling the app publicly included the daughter of Malaysian prime minister Anwar Ibrahim. Grab responded to the backlash with a statement saying it stood on the side of "humanity and hopes for peace and a ceasefire," without naming either side of the conflict, and shared a statement from Tong describing the post as personal, made before she had "a full picture of what was happening," and saying "I am simply saddened and feel very helpless for all the innocent lives lost."

Grab's December 2021 stock market debut was followed by shareholder litigation. After the company's shares fell sharply on news of widening losses in its first earnings report as a public company, Business Insider identified at least eleven United States law firms that had begun building cases for class action lawsuits alleging Grab had deceived shareholders about its financial prospects at the time of its SPAC listing. Earlier, during the June 2020 pandemic layoffs, former employees told Business Insider that morale inside the company fell sharply and that some found Tan's emotional delivery of the news, after months of the company presenting itself as a regional success story, difficult to reconcile with the abrupt scale of the job cuts.

Personal life

Tan is married to Chloe Tong, the daughter of Tong Kooi Ong, the Malaysian businessman who founded Phileo Allied Bank and chairs The Edge Media Group. The couple have named two of their children, a son, Emmanuel, and a daughter, Elizabeth, in an interview Tong gave about a children's nutrition booklet she wrote; by April 2021, the couple had a third child and were expecting a fourth. Tan became a citizen of Singapore in 2016, around the time Grab's operations relocated there from Malaysia.

Tan has described his Christian faith as central to his approach to leadership, citing Jesus Christ as a role model and describing his own path to becoming a "Christ centred disciple" through a mentorship with former Grab board member Andy Mills. He has said he devotes most of his time to the company, telling the Financial Times in 2019 that he does not need time off because "to me [the job] is a break." The family's July 2023 trip to Israel, and an Instagram post about it by Tong, became the trigger for a consumer boycott of Grab in two of its largest markets later that year; see Controversies, above.

Philanthropy

In 2021, Tan and Tong established ACE Team Foundation, a Singapore based family philanthropic foundation. According to Grab's regulatory filings, the foundation focuses on enhancing healthcare, education and community rehabilitation, with particular support directed toward autism, mental health and youth. Specific grant recipients and amounts have not been publicly disclosed.

Recognition

Grab's regulatory filings list a number of awards given to Tan during his time as chief executive: he was named to Fortune's 40 Under 40 list in 2016 and 2018, The Bloomberg 50 in 2017, Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in Business in 2018, and Fortune's World's 50 Greatest Leaders list in 2021. He received the Nikkei Asia Prize in 2020.

See also

• Grab Holdings
• Tan Hooi Ling
• Nadiem Makarim
• Uber
• Dara Khosrowshahi

External links

• Official website
• Grab Holdings Limited filings at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission