Grab’s $235 Million Profit, BYD Takes Over in Singapore, Toyota Lays Off Staff

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Welcome back to The Asia Tech Podcast. Today we discussed Grab’s confusing profit picture, why physical AI might be Southeast Asia’s biggest edge, and how BYD just overtook Toyota in Singapore.

We were joined by:

• 59:27 Shivek Sachdev - Managing Director, ServiceMind Asia

• 1:22:19 Tobias Leong - Co-Founder and CTO, Axium Industries

• 1:44:21 Jonas Schleypen - Co-Founder & CEO, Hoc-trade

• 2:02:26 Ilman Shazhaev - CEO and Founder, Dizzaract

• 2:25:12 Ajinkya Bhat - Founder and CEO, Seamless XR

Here is an overview of the topics we discussed today:

Grab’s $235 Million Profit Isn’t What It Looks Like

Grab just posted a $235 million profit, but only $19 million of that came from actual operations. The rest came from an accounting gain tied to its Superbank acquisition. So is Grab still a ride-hailing company, or is it quietly becoming a bank? Its loan portfolio just crossed $2 billion, and financial services revenue grew 59% in a single year.

Could Robots Be Southeast Asia’s Secret Weapon?

Southeast Asia pulled in $226 billion in foreign investment in 2024, and a lot of it went straight into new, AI-ready factories. Singapore already runs more industrial robots per worker than almost anywhere on earth. Could skipping old infrastructure entirely give this region an edge that bigger economies can’t match?

BYD Just Dethroned Toyota in Singapore

A year ago, Toyota was still ahead. Now BYD sells more than twice as many cars in Singapore and claims one in four new registrations. Toyota’s local dealer just laid off staff. What changed so fast, and could it happen to other legacy carmakers next?

Shivek: Property Management Gets an AI Brain

Shivek runs ServiceMind, software that keeps buildings across Thailand running behind the scenes. His team replaced human dispatchers with an AI agent that reads incoming maintenance requests and routes them automatically. Curious what feature tenants keep begging for that he refuses to build?

Tobias: The Hidden Math Behind Your Spare Parts

Tobias builds AI for the oil, gas, and manufacturing giants of Malaysia. His systems untangle messy inventory data so companies stop over-ordering or running out of critical spare parts. He also explained why his team skips the biggest AI models entirely in favor of smaller, cheaper ones. Why would that actually work better?

Jonas: Your Trading Habits, Laid Bare

Jonas built a tool that studies your own trading history and shows exactly when you’re about to sabotage yourself. Think of it as a medical report, but for your trading psychology. Does knowing your own patterns actually change how people trade?

Ilman: The Internet’s Spare Computing Power

Ilman thinks the AI industry is missing something obvious: millions of gaming PCs and small data centers sitting mostly idle. His company wants to stitch that spare power together into a cheaper alternative to renting from the giants. Could distributed computing undercut the trillion-dollar data center race?

Ajinkya: Feeling Is Believing, After a Stroke

Ajinkya’s company replaced an old-school test, literally pressing a filament on your skin, with a device that measures exactly how much feeling a patient has lost. It could help predict how fast stroke patients recover their sense of touch. Could this finally replace guesswork in rehabilitation?

Want the full story behind all of this? Watch the entire episode here:

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