/ciol/media/agency_attachments/c0E28gS06GM3VmrXNw5G.png)
Follow Us/ciol/media/post_banners/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/rsz_sq1_2849.jpg)
Uber's biggest rival in Southeast Asia- Grab Technologies has finally found its Chief Technology Officer (CTO). The company introduced Theo Vasiilakis, a former Google employee who also worked for Microsoft as CTO. Vassilakis is the third CTO for Grab after Wei Zhu, who held the post for a year, leaving in Aug 2015. Zhu was followed by Arul Kumaravel, who took over the CTO function while retaining his Head of Engineering post.
“Theo’s fantastic track record as an engineering leader, entrepreneur, and teacher at global technology companies makes him an invaluable addition to our executive team. With our platform generating 10 terabytes of data per day and doubling that number every quarter, we’re happy we can bring on board Theo’s deep expertise in scaling machine learning and engineering systems,” said Anthony Tan, Group CEO and Co-Founder, Grab.
Prior to joining Grab, Vassilakis held several senior engineering positions at global technology companies. Among others, Theo was a Partner, Architect and Dev Manager for Azure at Microsoft and a Principal Engineer and Engineering Director at Google. Vassilakis has a degree from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from Brown University, both in mathematics.
“Southeast Asia is an incredibly exciting region. There’s an opportunity to make the lives of hundreds of millions of people easier by developing products and services that can bring convenience and income opportunities. I look forward to working with Anthony and the Grab team to drive further the scalability, reliability and machine-learning capability of our platform as we move towards that goal,” said Theo Vassilakis.
Anthony Tan said that the new CTO will oversee Grab’s transport and payments platforms, lead the growth of its services and support the further development of machine learning, AI, data science and infrastructure scaling capabilities.