May Mobility, Inc., an autonomous vehicle tech firm, and Grab Holdings Limited (NASDAQ: GRAB), Southeast Asia’s superapp, announced their partnership with intentions to introduce autonomous vehicle services in Southeast Asia. This latest partnership reportedly includes an investment by Grab into May Mobility, backing the AV company as it expands its “commercial reach in the global autonomous ride-hail market beyond the U.S. and Japan.”
Grab and May Mobility will partner to integrate the latter’s autonomous driving technology into Grab’s core ecosystem, “including its fleet management, vehicle matching and routing systems.”
The partnership will combine May Mobility’s operational best practices and Grab’s local expertise to facilitate the “implementation of AVs into Southeast Asia, tailored to the unique needs of local infrastructure.”
Grab will be able to learn from May Mobility’s deployments in places like the U.S. as it enhances its capabilities. Grab will also work with May Mobility to identify “training, upskilling and transition opportunities for Grab driver-partners interested in AV-related roles. ”
As part of the partnership, May Mobility plans to leverage Grab’s mapping tech, GrabMaps, in order to study Southeast Asia road infrastructure.
Map technology and location-based data solutions “are foundational to an autonomous vehicle’s ability to safely and precisely navigate the world.”
The GrabMaps collab will help speed up the deployment of May Mobility’s AVs and drive more efficient operations. GrabMaps was developed via Grab’s operations throughout the “densely populated cities of Southeast Asia, using high-volume data collection and AI-based processing to deliver maps and location-based solutions with hyperlocal accuracy and coverage.”
Real-time feedback to GrabMaps keeps them “up to date with changing conditions, such as traffic build-ups and road closures, features that can improve the May Mobility AV rider experience.”
May Mobility’s Multi-Policy Decision Making (MPDM) driving tech uses AI reasoning models to analyze “thousands of potential scenarios every second and then selects the optimal maneuver in any given situation, even ‘edge cases.'”
This approach allows May Mobility’s vehicles to “adapt to the unexpected, without relying on vast amounts of pre-collected, geographically specific data.”
Thanks to MPDM’s adaptability, May Mobility’s AVs can now adjust to new international requirements—like Southeast Asian traffic conditions and left-hand driving—without “the need for extensive retraining.”
The integration of Grab’s mapping tech with May Mobility’s autonomous driving system will “enable faster localization and expansion into new markets.”
This agreement is May Mobility’s third ride-hail partnership, and comes alongside its launch on the Lyft network in Atlanta and its planned launch on the Uber platform.
May Mobility’s partner-driven approach to commercialization “focuses its resources on AV technology, while relying on ecosystem players like Grab to provide other parts of the value chain.”
Grab and May Mobility are now said to be planning their first deployment together, along with evaluating other areas of technical collaboration. The firms also intend to further explore May Mobility using Grab’s mapping tech for future endeavors beyond Southeast Asia, helping the AV company “to efficiently scale its operations more quickly across the globe.”