Microsoft Corp is investing in Southeast Asia passenger ride-hailing company Grab in a partnership that each corporations say will enable them to collaborate on technology projects including big data and artificial intelligence.
The corporations didn’t disclose the worth of the transaction.
Grab previously said it planned to lift about $3 billion by the top of the yr, of which it has already raised $2 billion.
Last week, Reuters reported that existing sponsor SoftBank Group Corp is near striking a deal to speculate about $500 million in Grab as a part of a financing round.
Sources told Reuters that Grab is more likely to raise the remaining of the funding from strategic and financial firms.
Before Tuesday’s deal, it had raised $2 billion in 2018 led by Toyota Motor Corp and financial firms including Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital.
Over the past six years, Singapore-based Grab has expanded its passenger transportation business to 235 cities in eight Southeast Asian countries.
It desires to grow to be a number one consumer technology group, offering services resembling food and parcel delivery, electronic money transfers, micro-loans and mobile payments along with passenger transport.
Grab will work with Microsoft to explore mobile facial recognition, image recognition and computer vision technologies to enhance the reception experience, the businesses said in a press release on Tuesday.
For example, passengers will have the option to take a photograph of their current location and translate it into the motive force’s actual address.
Other areas of the five-year agreement include Grab adopting Microsoft Azure as its preferred cloud platform and using it for data analytics and fraud detection services.
Source : Reuters
