Grab appoints Philipp Kandal as Chief Product Officer

Grab Holdings Limited, Southeast Asia’s leading superapp, today announced that it has promoted Philipp Kandal to Chief Product Officer, effective February 1, 2023. He will oversee the Product, Design and Analytics teams and lead the product vision and strategy for Grab.

As Chief Product Officer, Kandal will lead teams responsible for delivering products that consumers, driver- and merchant-partners trust and love, while driving profitable growth for the company.

Kandal will focus on unlocking greater synergies across Grab’s superapp ecosystem to create more value for our users and partners, and building a product mix that offers affordable services for those seeking value as well as highly differentiated premium offerings.

Kandal joined Grab in 2019 to lead the engineering and data science teams for Geo, the firm’s vertical for location-based intelligence and services. He then became head of Geo in January 2022. Last year, his scope was expanded to oversee the Fulfillment product and tech teams that ensure bookings and orders are efficiently and reliably fulfilled using the ecosystem of Grab’s driver-partner network and marketplace capabilities.

Under his leadership, Grab launched its enterprise service GrabMaps in June 2022 to address Southeast Asia’s hyperlocal mapping needs. GrabMaps powers Grab services in all eight countries it operates in and helps Grab avoid tens of millions of dollars in potential third-party mapping fees every year.

He will continue to lead the Geo organization in addition to his Chief Product Officer responsibilities.

“He is a strong proven executor and has successfully led several game changing innovations for Grab, including the development of GrabMaps and initiatives that have made the Grab ecosystem more effective,” said Grab co-founder Tan Hooi Ling.

Kandal co-founded and was the CTO of Skobbler, which was acquired by Silicon Valley based Telenav, where he served as Senior VP for Engineering in his last role prior to joining Grab. At Telenav, he was a part of the executive team, leading the global engineering team of 400+ members and focused on innovation in the connected car space, delivering solutions to tens of millions of vehicles as well as AI based mapmaking.