Singapore ride-hailing company's new CTO Theo Vassilakis to Grab opportunity with both hands

Singaporean ride-hailing firm, Grab, has announced a new Chief Technology Officer.

Theo Vassilakis will take on the role which is based in Singapore.

Vassilakis has most recently worked as “Partner, Architect and Development Manager” for Microsoft’s Azure cloud service.

He began working for Microsoft when the tech company took over his data analytics start-up, Metanutix, in 2012.

Prior to this he also worked for Google as Principal Engineer and Engineering Director.

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Vassilakis holds qualifications from Stanford University Brown University. He will be filling the space at Grab left by Facebook Connect creator, Wei Zhu.

According to CEO Anthony Tan, the new CTO will mainly focus on research and development, in particular of the company’s transport and payment platforms but also AI and infrastructure scaling.

At present, the company offers ride-hailing and logistics services across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand and Myanmar. It has over 1mn drivers and recently launched a mobile payments service called GrabPay.

Grab currently has six research and development facilities and most recently invested $700mn in the Indonesian market ait continues to expand.

The company hopes to add almost 1,000 jobs in research and development by 2018.