Grab Invests in Momenta to Bring Driverless Ride-Hailing to Southeast Asia

The decade began with a palpable sense of deflation in the autonomous driving market. After years of investment building toward a driverless shared mobility revolution in 2020, the market quickly rationalized in the direction of Level 2+ supervised highway automation features in the context of conventional passenger cars. However, a series of high-profile partnerships, investments, and launches in 2025 all indicate a much more promising end to the decade for driverless shared mobility. A recent ABI Insight, “Uber Announces Deal with NVIDIA to Deliver 100,000 Robotaxis from 2027,” detailed Uber’s ecosystem of software and Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) partners coalescing around NVIDIA’s Hyperion platform. More recently, Norwegian public transportation agency, Ruter, announced its intention to leverage Volskwagen’s MOIA vehicles, based on the Mobileye Drive platform, in Oslo. In tandem, these two rollouts could see over 130,000 robotaxis introduced to public roads.

This momentum was confirmed as a truly global phenomenon by Grab’s announcement of an investment in and partnership with Chinese autonomous vehicle software developer, Momenta, which will see the two companies deploy driverless robotaxi services in the Southeast Asian market.

The Southeast Asian ride-hailing market has a number of unique features, with Grab having profited from its ability to better adapt to consumer requirements and calibrate its supplier incentives more effectively than competitors. One of these unique features, relative to the North American and European markets, is the high proportion of trips fulfilled by 2-wheel vehicles, rather than 4-wheeled passenger cars. For example, ABI Research’s assessment of the ride-hailing market in 1H 2025 found that 70% of ride-hailing trips in Indonesia and 72% of trips in Vietnam were fulfilled by 2-wheeled vehicles. This raises question marks over the impact that autonomous operation, which is only applicable to wheeled passenger vehicles, can have on the 2-wheel-dominated Southeast Asian ride-hailing market.

In the first instance, while 2-wheel dominates, passenger-vehicle fulfillment remains an important component of the ride-hailing market, even in those that skew most heavily to 2-wheeled vehicles. Moreover, Grab consistently has a higher proportion of 4-wheel trips than the market average across the key Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries, with the exception of its home market of Singapore, which is entirely 4-wheel. Grab’s strategy of targeting high-quality drivers for 4-wheel trip fulfillment is a key part of its brand identity, reinforcing its market position as a more premium option relative to more cost-focused alternatives. In this regard, Grab is facing increasing competition, for example, within Vietnam, where Xanh SM/GSM is leveraging vertical integration with Vingroup’s Vinfast OEM brand to roll out a specialist Electric Vehicle (EV) 4-wheel alternative. As a result, developing a robust robotaxi service will be key plank in Grab’s strategy to retain its position as a premium provider of smart mobility services.

A number of factors have likely driven Grab’s choice of Momenta as its partner for driverless mobility services, with important lessons for Autonomous Vehicle (AV) platform suppliers looking to secure business with ride-hailing operators as part of their demand-generation strategy.

Level 2+ Foundation:

Level 2+ has not only served a vital role as a revenue generator for AV software suppliers in recent years, but it has also given AV software developers access to mass volumes of data generated by passenger vehicles in operation that feature their Level 2+ software. This has been essential in refining algorithms for perception and path planning, building crowd-sourced maps, securing evidence for superhuman safety, etc., all of which has become the key foundation for a successful Level 4 rollout. This has been a cornerstone of Momenta’s strategy since its founding, which it refers to as its “flywheel” approach.

Passenger Vehicle Traction:

A secondary advantage of a Level 2+ approach has been to forge deeper relationships between AV software developers and passenger vehicle OEMs. The progress of AV development in the past 5 years has had the effect of narrowing the hardware specifications of Level 2+ passenger vehicles and Level 4 robotaxis, with a common platform between both implementations, which is supplemented with redundancy in the form of tertiary sensors (typically Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and some imaging radar) for unsupervised robotaxi deployments. As a result, AV software developers that have proven traction for Level 2+ implementations with passenger vehicle OEMs have a strong foundation with which to approach robotaxi operators, minimizing the additional engineering work that the ride-hailing operator might have to undertake to adapt the vehicle for its robotaxi applications. As Grab made clear in its announcement of the Momenta partnership:

Globally, the large-scale deployment of autonomous driving technology services has long been constrained by high costs of vehicle modification and hardware integration. Through deep cooperation with leading automakers, Momenta has integrated L4-level autonomous driving capabilities into mass-produced vehicle models, enabling an autonomous driving technology solution that can be deployed without costly post-production modifications.

Uber’s selection of the NVIDIA Hyperion 10 platform gave it access to multiple OEMs as manufacturing partners, which had already begun development with the Hyperion platform for passenger vehicle deployments. Furthermore, Mobileye’s close relationship with multiple Volkswagen brands has made it easy for Uber in the United States and Ruter in Europe to deploy Mobileye’s Drive platform with Volkswagen MOIA enabling factory line installation of the key enabling technologies. It is clear, therefore, that AV developers wishing to gain more traction in the robotaxi space must, in fact, prioritize traction in the passenger vehicle space, leveraging the manufacturing capability of OEM partners to reduce the cost of entry to driverless operation for would-be ride-hailing customers.

Scalability:

Southeast Asia is a highly diverse region, with a variety of driving cultures, regulations, common practices, and styles. Momenta’s focus on end-to-end AI is appealing to any ride-hailing operator wanting to quickly scale and transplant success in one country into parallel markets.