Grab Holdings Limited, the Southeast Asia’s leading superapp, has on Monday announced that it has promoted Philipp Kandal to Chief Product Officer, effective February 1, 2023.
Grab said in a statement that Kandal will oversee the product, design and analytics teams and lead the product vision and strategy for Grab.
As Chief Product Officer, Philipp will lead teams responsible for delivering products that consumers, driver- and merchant-partners trust and love, while driving profitable growth for the company.
He will focus on unlocking greater synergies across Grab’s superapp ecosystem to create more value for our users and partners, and building a product mix that offers affordable services for those seeking value as well as highly differentiated premium offerings.
“Philipp embodies the rare combination of technical strength, an entrepreneurial mindset, and a genuine customer obsession. He is a strong proven executor, and has successfully led several game changing innovations for Grab, including the development of GrabMaps and initiatives that have made the Grab ecosystem more effective,
“I am excited to have him lead and shape our product innovations towards becoming Southeast Asia’s largest and most efficient on-demand platform for local commerce and mobility,” said Tan Hooi Ling, Co-Founder of Grab.
Drawn to Grab’s mission to create economic empowerment for everyone in Southeast Asia, Kandal joined the company in October 2019 to lead the engineering and data science teams for Geo, the vertical that powers location-based intelligence and services.
Soon, he became the head of the entire Geo organization, managing the business, product and tech functions.
In 2022, his scope was expanded to oversee the Fulfillment product and tech teams that ensure bookings and orders are efficiently and reliably fulfilled using the ecosystem of Grab’s driver-partner network and marketplace capabilities.
He will continue to lead the Geo organization in addition to his Chief Product Officer responsibilities.
Under his leadership, Grab launched its enterprise service GrabMaps in June 2022 to address Southeast Asia’s hyperlocal mapping needs. GrabMaps powers Grab services in all eight countries it operates in, and helps Grab avoid tens of millions of dollars in potential third-party mapping fees every year.
As Grab accelerated on its path to profitability, Kandal and his teams successfully rolled out several initiatives to optimize costs and improve efficiencies within the Grab superapp ecosystem.
These include Just-in-Time allocation, order batching, reducing wait-time for driver-partners and deploying compact bluetooth beacons at various food merchants, allowing Grab to accurately know how long driver-partners waited to pick up the orders.
An entrepreneur for the early part of his career, Kandal co-founded and was the Chief Technology Officer of Skobbler, which was acquired by Silicon Valley based Telenav, where he served as Senior VP for Engineering in his last role prior to joining Grab.
At Telenav, Kandal was a part of the executive team, leading the global engineering team of 400+ members and focused on innovation in the connected car space, delivering solutions to tens of millions of vehicles as well as artificial intelligence (AI) based mapmaking.
Grab was founded in 2012 with the mission to drive Southeast Asia forward by creating economic empowerment for everyone, and since then, the Grab app has been downloaded onto millions of mobile devices.
The firm strives to serve a triple bottom line: to simultaneously deliver financial performance for its shareholders and have a positive social and environmental impact in Southeast Asia.
The firm operates across the deliveries, mobility and digital financial services sectors in over 480 cities in eight countries in the Southeast Asia region – Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
Keyword: Grab appoints Philipp Kandal as Chief Product Officer