GrabCopied

Grab was co-founded by Anthony Tan in Malaysia in 2012 as an app for booking taxis. By early 2016 it had moved into chauffeured cars with GrabCar, motorcycle rides with GrabBike, carpooling with GrabHitch and courier deliveries with GrabExpress, and claimed some 200,000 drivers and around 1.5 million bookings a day across 28 cities in six Southeast Asian countries, The Straits Times reported. Its main rival, Uber, was far bigger globally.

On 28 January 2016 GrabTaxi rebranded as Grab. Tan said the company had become much more than a taxi app and that one brand should encapsulate all its services. The company framed the brand around three freedoms: to get somewhere safely and conveniently, to choose the right transport option, and for drivers to pursue a rewarding livelihood.

The logo was built on that idea of freedom. Two parallel lines, inspired by roadways, stand for the endless road of possibilities and for the journey Grab takes alongside passengers, drivers, employees and society, the company said. The rebrand came with a lighter, faster app: pre-filled pick-up points ranked by time and place, automatic retry when no car is found, live driver tracking and simpler sign-up. Co-founder Tan Hooi Ling said the goal was booking a ride in two clicks.

The timing mattered. Grab had just announced a partnership with Didi Kuaidi, Lyft and Ola, and had raised more than $700 million from backers including SoftBank and a Temasek subsidiary. Tan told The Straits Times a public listing was always an option.

Grab's own release added the scale and the promises. Since 2012 it had grown from a humble taxi-booking app to Southeast Asia's largest land transport company, with more than 11 million mobile downloads, and it framed the brand around three freedoms: to get somewhere safely, to choose the best transport option, and to pursue a rewarding livelihood. The app was made lighter for faster bookings, with a hyperlocal approach to language and payment preferences in each city. Three freedoms is a lot of philosophy for two lines, but dropping Taxi from the name was the decision that mattered.

Dropping 'Taxi' was the obvious, necessary move, and it left room for the food, payments and finance businesses that came later. The road-lines symbol is a little literal and the green is generic, but as a name, Grab is short, active and impossible to forget.