Are you in the Grab or Gojek camp?

Dear readers,

A couple of months ago, Grab raised $850 million. And just yesterday, Facebook and PayPal announced that they’re injecting cash into Gojek, marking the social network giant’s first investment in an Indonesia-based startup.

Read ⇒ Facebook, PayPal will help Gojek win Indonesia 🇮🇩, but not SEA

Left: Kevin Aluwi, Co-CEO of Gojek, Right: Andre Soelistyo, Co-CEO of Gojek / Photo credit: Gojek

With the new investments announced, we thought it would be nice to update this visualization. You can zoom in and out of the chart as well as click on specific funding rounds and the names of individual investors. For now, please have a look at this:

What the graph shows is that with the exception of Visa, investors are either siding with Gojek or Grab. It’s hard to have a foot in both camps, and that’s perfectly normal behavior.

If you zoom in closer, you can see a SoftBank vs. Google-Tencent skirmish happening. The Tencent camp also includes other Chinese tech giants Meituan-Dianping and JD.com. However, I’m not the first to point this out: Tech in Asia guest writer Jessica Chang made this observation two years ago.

Picking one side over the other has a trickle-down effect, too. For example, you may receive friendly messages from the other camp saying how disappointed they are in your choices. Again, I guess that’s bound to happen as the competition heats up. It highlights how fierce the Grab-Gojek rivalry is and that the tension does make a merger between the two seem impossible. If that’s the case, then may the best team win.

Here are some related pieces that you may enjoy:

• A Grab-Gojek merger makes sense but isn’t the smartest play
• Minor Gojek, Grab investors head for the exit amid worsening economy
• Gojek says transport business has been profitable, denies layoffs
• The dark – and bright – side of cloud kitchens
• An analysis of Gojek and Grab’s valuations and profitability prospects

Ten years ago, no one in the community could have predicted that Silicon Valley titans such as Google, Microsoft, and Facebook would one day invest in Southeast Asia. But it’s happening as we enter the region’s golden age, and that’s all thanks to the fearless founders, investors, and makers who believed in its potential. 🙏

You can find last week’s commentary via this link: “There’s no such thing as a perfect layoff”. You can also read all my commentaries here.