This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on January 29, 2016.

KUALA LUMPUR: MyTeksi, Southeast Asia’s largest ride-hailing platform with over 200,000 drivers and over 11 million mobile downloads, has rebranded itself to Grab.

Starting as a taxi-hailing app in 2012, Grab has extended its product platform to include taxis (GrabTaxi), private car services (GrabCar), motorcycle taxis (GrabBike), social carpooling (GrabHitch) and last mile delivery (GrabExpress) under one umbrella brand.

“We’ve grown over the years — and we’re now much more than a taxi app. This new brand is an important evolution that represents our goal to out-serve our customers,” Grab group chief executive officer Anthony Tan said in a statement yesterday.

“We are not only providing passengers with a transport service; we are saving them time and ensuring they have a safe ride,” he added.

Since mid-2015, Grab said, it had experienced a 35% average monthly growth in GrabCar rides and a 75% average monthly growth in GrabBike rides across the region.

Anthony said the new brand represents the company’s growing platform of on-demand services to serve the transport industry as a whole.

Meanwhile, Grab is introducing several new features to make its app more user-friendly. For one, Grab will launch a new “Flash” app feature in Malaysia on Saturday, where with the touch of a button, Flash searches all of the closest taxis and GrabCars to find the best vehicle for users.

Flash is currently available in Singapore, the Philippines and Vietnam, and will be rolled out in Thailand next month. Another new app feature is GrabPay, which has multiple credit card support available in Singapore (starting yesterday), and in Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia next month.

GrabPay will be rolled out in Thailand and Vietnam in the first half of 2016.

“We are focused on designing the best possible product. We take a hyperlocal approach to understand what users in each Southeast Asian city prefer, from language preferences to payment options,” said Grab co-founder Tan Hooi Ling.

“The updated Grab app is about improving the core experience — we want to make it as simple as two clicks to book a ride,” she added.