In the ballroom of the five-star Shangri-La Singapore hotel, Anthony Tan celebrated a triumph for the country’s up-and-coming tech scene. “Today we shine a spotlight on Southeast Asia!” he told the adoring crowd. His company, Grab, the region’s answer to Uber, was about to make its stock market debut.
Tan had launched Grab Holdings Ltd. in 2012, just as ride-hailing companies were taking off. Masayoshi Son, the billionaire founder of Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp., one of Uber’s venture capital backers, was also behind Grab. Other investors included BlackRock, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley and Temasek, the Singapore state investment firm.
Not since the first internet boom of the 1990s had there been such hunger for unprofitable startups. Before it started publicly trading, Grab was valued at $40 billion, almost as much as American Airlines, Delta Air Lines and United Airlines combined. Tan, only 39 at the time, was on track to become a billionaire.
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