SINGAPORE — Ride-hailing firm Grab will be doubling its research and development (R&D) space in its Singapore headquarters.

The company announced that it would be moving to an office space of almost 100,000sqf in Singapore’s central business district from its current offices in Sin Ming estate.

The local headquarters is the group’s largest R&D centre. TODAY understands that the company is looking at a number of locations in the financial district, including Marina One, an integrated development in the Marina Bay financial district.

“We are proud of the great work we have seen out of our Singapore office,” said Mr Lim Kell Jay, head of Grab Singapore.

In recent months, the company has enhanced its new transport services such as GrabShuttle, GrabCoach and GrabShare.

“Our expansion, coupled with our S$10 million investment in GrabCar, underlines our commitment to advancing Singapore’s world-class transportation hub and car-lite vision,” said Mr Lim.

The company also announced that it would be opening two new regional R&D centres, in Bangalore and Ho Chi Minh City, adding to its centres in Singapore, Beijing, Jakarta and Seattle.

The firm plans to hire more than 800 new employees over the next two years to boost its R&D capabilities across the six centres.

Of the total, 200 new jobs will be created in the India office, which will focus on developing new payment technologies for GrabPay, the company’s digital payments platform.

The Vietnam centre will aim to improve the user experience.

“South-east Asia is developing at a breakneck pace,” said Ms Tan Hooi Ling, co-founder of Grab.

“Our philosophy is to develop our highly localised products in the countries where our consumers live, while tapping into the best specialised tech talent around the world.”

Grab has over 710,000 drivers in its network. With over 36 million mobile downloads of the Grab app to date, Grab has 95 per cent market share of third-party taxi-hailing apps and more than half the market share in private cars in the markets in which it operates, according to Grab.