Grab appoints new CTO

Grab’s incoming CTO Theo Vassilakis. Photo credit: Grab.

Grab has appointed Theo Vassilakis as its new chief technology officer (CTO), it announced today. Based in Singapore, he will take charge of Grab’s research and development (R&D) strategy at a time when it is looking to enhance its current offerings, while expanding beyond ride-hailing into new areas such as cashless payments.

Vassilakis’ most recent role was as development manager at Microsoft for its Azure cloud service. Vassilakis arrived at the tech giant in late 2015 after it acquired Metanautix, the big data analytics startup he founded in 2012. This marked his second stint in Redmond, having commenced his software engineering career at Microsoft in 2001 before joining Google four years later.

Grab’s R&D function has seen its fair share of upheaval in terms of personnel changes over the years.

In August, vice president of engineering Arul Kumaravel quit the company, apparently due to personal reasons, after almost two-and-a-half years in the role. He had been brought over to Singapore from Seattle, where he previously served as a senior software engineer for both Amazon and Microsoft.

The last person to sit in the CTO’s chair at Grab was former Facebook engineer – and creator of Facebook Connect – Wei Zhu. He joined the company at around the same time as Kumaravel, but left barely a year later – and not long after, filed suit against Grab in a dispute over stock options. He has since launched Axinan, a startup which is building a blockchain-based online insurance brokerage.

In the wake of Kumaravel’s departure, Grab told Tech in Asia that the company would be doubling down on recruiting R&D professionals, with a target of hiring around 800 people to its technology teams worldwide over the next two years. In a statement today, Grab claimed it is “on track to add close to 1,000 R&D jobs across its six R&D centres by end of 2018.”