Grab Solidifies Leadership in Digital Payments with Agreement to Acquire Kudo

Grab is a prominent ride-hailing and mobile payments platform that plies its trade in Southeast Asia, and it has made some progress cementing their place in the market with an agreement to acquire Kudo.

Kudo is known for being the leading online to offline ecommerce platform in Indonesia. With its closing, the Kudo team and platform will be integrated with Grab’s proprietary mobile payments platform, GrabPay.

Kudo boasts a one-of-a-kind O2O platform which enables Indonesia’s unbanked consumers to shop online by connecting them with the online merchants and service providers via Kudo’s network of over 400,000 authorized agents in 500 towns and cities across Indonesia.

GrabPay’s insurmountable reach across major Indonesian cities will complement Kudo’s strong presence across Indonesia’s smaller cities and rural areas. Grab plans to support and accelerate the expansion of Kudo’s agent network while at the same time leveraging Kudo’s reach to bring more riders, drivers and GrabPay users onto the Grab platform.

“Kudo is revolutionizing how consumers in Indonesia pay for goods and services, and we are very pleased to welcome them to the Grab family,” said Ming Maa, President of Grab. “Combining Kudo’s innovative O2O ecommerce solution and extensive agent network with GrabPay and Grab’s massive and active customer base will advance our mission of providing millions of people across Indonesia with increased access to convenient cashless payments and new income opportunities, while also unlocking compelling new ways to boost online spending. Kudo’s integration represents an important first step in our ‘Grab 4 Indonesia’ plan to provide all Indonesians an opportunity to move into the digital economy.”

“Grab shares our vision of creating payments solutions that empower the unbanked to benefit from the rapid growth of ecommerce, and we look forward to embarking on the next stage of our growth as part of the Grab team,” said Albert Lucius, CEO of Kudo. “Given that GrabPay is already one of the most widely-used payments platforms in Indonesia, this acquisition creates immediate synergies with our existing business. We are excited to work together to bring the ease and convenience of cashless payments to more Indonesians than ever before.”