Grab is today one of the most well-known companies globally, and has already been listed on the Nasdaq exchange in the United States. Grab was founded in 2012 as MyTeksi in Malaysia, before it was rebranded to Grab in 2016.
Grab provides a ride-hailing service that allows users to get a vehicle to a destination. Apart from that, it also adds support for ordering food, ordering goods delivery, ordering goods from supermarkets, financial services, and so on. In fact, Grab has also taken over the Jaya Grocer supermarket to continue to strengthen their offering.
With a variety of product and service offerings, the mainstay for everything is the technology behind it. Grab's success can be attributed to its technological capabilities – in terms of consumers, retailers and other parties involved. Leading the technology development department at this young company is Suthen Thomas.
Suthen Thomas was born in Malaysia, and has obtained a degree in software engineering through Universiti Multimedia Malaysia (MMU).
Suthen has been with Grab since its inception. When MyTeksi was founded in 2012, Suthen Thomas became the technical head who led the development of applications on MyTeksi. At that time, Suthen led a small team in developing the application that became the basis of Grab's success to this day. At that time, they also experimented with Node.js due to the "event-driven" capabilities it offered, in addition to allowing development to be expanded well using it.
However, after several years, Suthen continued his studies in the field of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School in 2015, under the Khazanah Global scholarship.
Returning from the study, Suthen returned with Grab, and since last 2022, has started to be the CTO for the Grab group. Suthen is now responsible for the overall technology vision for Grab, in addition to strategy, execution and business covering delivery, driving, and finance. At the same time, Suthen also focused on continuing to strengthen Grab's technical infrastructure, as well as bringing faster innovation to meet the demands of consumers and other business partners.
With the era of artificial intelligence as well, Grab is not left behind and has started investing in machine learning over the past few years. This includes predicting journeys and fares, managing delivery and driving services efficiently, and personalizing offers according to users. Technology development for Grab is also done in clusters that focus on various different features – to ensure smooth development and not impact other teams. As many are aware, Grab's feature offerings are different according to each country. For example, in Indonesia they also optimize the delivery of food and even people via motorbike – which is not available in other markets. More or less the same for financial services that have different laws according to country. This is all achieved through planning the best use of technology so that it does not overlap and make it difficult in terms of implementation at the system level.
Also under Suthen, GrabMaps was started with the aim of developing its own mapping system that is friendlier to drivers and dispatchers, as well as ensuring that the mapping data is always fresh and up-to-date – unlike other services that take a long time to update certain data.
Today, Grab itself experiments with more than 700 changes to the interface at any one time, often involving a small number of users – before rolling out a change or feature to the public. In addition, Grab now has data with a capacity of over 67PB, which is used by the data scientist team in developing certain features, and optimizing services, as well as for other purposes in continuing to improve the offering.
Suthen Thomas himself stated that he is happy to lead the Grab team, and loves the arena of technical development and programming himself. "Programming is like magic in the real world, where we can develop and create something that helps many people around the world".