Grab has grown from a ride hailing app into one of Southeast Asia’s most influential super apps offering mobility, food delivery, financial services, and digital payments.

Behind the scenes, innovation is a constant engine that shapes how Grab anticipates market shifts, evaluates emerging technologies and more importantly, help solve customer pain points.

We sat down with Ye Thu Aung and Shailesh Mahadeo Tavate from Grab Patent Office, who work closely with tech and business stakeholders, to learn how Grab approaches innovation and how Patsnap supports their strategy across competitive intelligence and investment evaluation.

Grab is known for evolving beyond its roots in ride hailing. What drives innovation inside the company?

Shailesh: At Grab, innovation has always been driven by one thing: The consumers. We never innovate for the sake of innovating. Everything starts with understanding what Southeast Asian users face in their daily lives and how we can solve those challenges in practical, meaningful ways.

Ye Thu: Let me give you an example. GrabTaxi was born because commuters, especially females, don’t feel safe to take a cab alone late at night. Food delivery, financial services, payments, and even our newer autonomous mobility vision came from the same principle. When we see a real problem that matters to millions of people, that becomes our north star.

How does your team stay close to the engineering side and ensure innovation stays aligned with customer needs?

Ye Thu: My role is to be the eyes and ears of the tech organization. I work closely with our engineering teams and with Shailesh, from our legal IP team. We constantly communicate to make sure we understand what they are building, what insights they need, and how external technology trends might impact us.

Cross functional collaboration is very important at Grab. We do it not only through formal work processes, but also informally. Sometimes, innovation comes from simple coffee chats. Getting to know the team on a personal level helps us collaborate better, challenge each other, and share insights quickly.

Where does Patsnap fit into Grab’s innovation and decision-making process?

Shailesh: Patsnap plays a big role across several parts of our work. We use it for patent prior art search, competitive analysis, and patent valuation.

It gives us a structured way to validate innovation and understand where the industry is heading.

When we evaluate startups for potential investment or partnership, Patsnap gives us very detailed analyses into their patent portfolios. This information is critical in our risk management process.

We also use Patsnap to generate summaries that we can quickly share with our engineering teams so they can understand relevant prior art quickly. It helps to align the team and bring everyone onto the same page.

Autonomous and remote driving have become increasingly important for Grab’s long-term mobility strategy, especially with recent partnerships and investments in this space. How does Patsnap support your team’s work in autonomous driving, and what role does it play in helping you spot new trends?

Ye Thu: Autonomous driving is a big area of interest and growth for us, especially as part of our collaboration with WeRide on autonomous shuttle buses that are going to be deployed in Punggol, Singapore in 2026.

Patsnap helps us uncover emerging trends, identify white spaces, and understand which areas need more innovation. We can see who the major players are, what top assignees are filing, and how the competitive landscape is shifting.

The Patsnap Discovery tool is particularly useful. If we want to filter a trend and see which startups are entering the space, we can do that instantly. It tells us whether the companies in our focus area have portfolios worth paying attention to and whether they are defensible. This helps us increase work efficiency significantly and get to the crux of our research faster.

You mentioned patent valuation. How do you use that in decision making?

Shailesh: When evaluating a group of companies, let’s say 20 startups working on the same technology theme, Patsnap helps us identify which ones stand out from an IP perspective.

If a company’s patents have higher defensibility scores, we know the claims tend to be broader and more robust. If the score is lower, the patents may be easier to invalidate. This becomes a very strong signal for us when assessing whether a portfolio is good or bad. It influences both investment decisions and partnership considerations.

How do you manage patent risks and how does Patsnap help your team stay ahead?

Ye Thu: We set up alerts through the Patsnap platform on companies of interest so we can detect new filings or emergent activity. This is part of our risk management process.

We want to know early if a competitor is moving into a new area, filing aggressively, or shifting strategy in terms of number of filings or geographical regions. Patsnap helps us keep a pulse on market movements and stay ahead.

What stands out about Patsnap from a usability standpoint?

Ye Thu: In my personal opinion, Patsnap UI is very intuitive. It is much easier to navigate compared to other tools. When you are working with complex patent data and large datasets, usability matters a lot. We can get insights faster and share them more easily with engineering and leadership teams.

If you had to summarize Grab’s innovation philosophy, what would it be?

Ye Thu: Innovation must be purposeful. It must solve real consumer problems. And it must be built through collaboration between engineering, strategy, and legal teams.

Shailesh: Tools like Patsnap help us move faster, make clearer decisions, reduce risk, and stay ahead of where the market is going.

But at the core, innovation comes from our teams being hungry to understand our users and improve their lives. That has not changed since day one.