Southeast Asian ride-hailing firm Grab acquires Bangalore-based payments platform iKaaz

Bangalore-based payments startup, iKaaz has been acquired by Grab, a Southeast Asian ride-hailing firm in the bid to strengthen the latter’s payments platform GrabPay.

While financial details of the deal were not disclosed, Grab says the flexibility and scalability of technology from iKaaz makes it ideally suitable for Southeast Asia’s diverse payments landscape and population that is unbanked.

Grab currently, offers services in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar and Cambodia and are in competition with the likes of Uber Technologies. The company supposedly facilitates more than 3.5 million transactions each day and over a billion per year. Last year Grab also bought Indonesian online payment startup Kudo.

iKaaz was launched in 2014 and their technology spans across areas like QR-code, online payments, NFC, audio-based payments, bill payments and peer-to-peer. On completion of the deal, the iKaaz team will join Grab’s research and development centre in Bengaluru. The Bengaluru centre was set up in March of 2017 and is one of Grab’s six such units globally.

Jason Thompson, GrabPay Southeast Asia Managing Director said, “We look forward to leveraging the expertise of iKaaz’s leadership team and build GrabPay into Southeast Asia’s universal payments platform together.”