Grab agreed to buy a 60% controlling stake in Atome Financial for $1.49 billion in cash, folding a $1 billion-plus consumer loan book into its financial-services arm. The company raised its 2025-2028 revenue growth target to more than 30% annually and lifted its 2028 adjusted EBITDA goal to $1.7 billion.
Grab Holdings will pay $1.49 billion in cash for 60% of Atome Financial, a deal that buys the superapp a consumer-credit book it could not have built organically before 2028 and resets the profit math for its financial-services arm.
"Atome is the natural next stage," Anthony Tan, chief executive officer at Grab, said on the call announcing the transaction. Alex Hungate, Grab's president and chief operating officer, said the purchase lets the company "leapfrog" years of underwriting-model and distribution development.
The structure carries the risk. Grab funds the entire $1.49 billion from existing cash, including $260 million of primary growth capital injected into Atome, so there is no share issuance and no new debt. The remaining 40% is tied to Atome's adjusted EBITDA and revenue performance over the two years after closing, which Grab expects by the third quarter of 2027 subject to regulatory approvals. Atome keeps its brand, licences and management team through the earn-out, with Grab setting risk-appetite guardrails and any funding or distribution cooperation conducted at arm's length.
What Grab gets for the cheque is scale it has struggled to assemble. Atome brings a gross loan book above $1 billion, more than 25 million cumulative transacting users and relationships with over 30,000 brands, and operates in five of the six markets where Grab is present. Its underwriting engine runs more than 100,000 variables across 131 models, with 22 live artificial-intelligence applications in the risk stack, according to management. Atome is already adjusted EBITDA positive and has grown gross merchandise value more than ninefold over six years.
The gap between that asset and Grab's own lending base is the whole investment case. Only 1% of Grab's 138 million annual transacting users borrow from the company today, and its lending has been confined largely to drivers, merchants and digital-bank customers. Management sees room to expand the lending user base more than tenfold over the medium term.
Grab lifted its medium-term outlook alongside the deal. Revenue is now guided to compound at more than 30% annually from 2025 through 2028, against a prior target of 20%. Group adjusted EBITDA for 2028 moves to $1.7 billion from $1.5 billion.
The financial-services numbers are where the credibility test sits. Grab expects to exit 2026 with a gross loan portfolio above $3 billion and to exceed $6 billion by the end of 2028, assuming Atome consolidates on schedule, and targets $500 million of adjusted EBITDA from the segment in 2028 including Atome. That compares with negative $110 million of adjusted EBITDA for financial services in 2025. Chief financial officer Peter Oey said the segment remains on track to turn profitable in the second half of 2026.
Oey also addressed how the loan book gets funded, saying the expansion is not an equity-funded strategy. Most of the book is expected to sit with Grab's consolidated digital banks — GXS, GXBank and Superbank — while Atome continues developing relationships with third-party financing partners. That distinction matters for anyone modelling dilution: a $6 billion loan book held on balance sheet consumes capital in a way a $6 billion book originated and distributed does not.
Capital allocation runs in the other direction too. Grab intends to complete roughly $900 million of remaining share buybacks over the next 12 months, after repurchasing $351 million through August 2026 under programmes announced in February and August. Cumulative buybacks from 2024 would reach $1.75 billion, more than 10% of shares outstanding since the start of that year, and the company plans to cancel the repurchased stock. A further $160 million is earmarked for affordability offerings and grocery and retail build-out.
The competitive read-through lands on Southeast Asia's other consumer-credit platforms. Sea's Shopee PayLater, GoTo's consumer-lending operations and the region's independent BNPL providers now face a competitor that pairs a loan book with ride-hailing, food delivery and payments data on 138 million annual transacting users. Grab said it will keep both companies' existing consumer-lending products in overlapping markets including Singapore and Malaysia rather than retire them immediately, which points to a period of parallel brands competing for the same borrowers before any consolidation.
The precedent for this kind of platform-plus-credit combination is instructive. Grab's own digital-bank build-out took years to reach meaningful lending volume, and the company's financial-services segment has been loss-making throughout. Buying an adjusted EBITDA positive lender with an existing merchant network compresses that timeline, but it also imports credit-cycle exposure at a point when regional consumer delinquencies remain the key swing factor for every BNPL operator.
The market's initial verdict was mixed. Grab shares traded up more than 1% pre-market on the headline before swinging to intraday declines of roughly 3% to 4%, and the stock closed at $2.885 on Sept. 21, down about 20% from levels near $3.60 in late August. Grab reported roughly $3.37 billion in revenue with a pretax profit margin near negative 169.5%, against $6.8 billion in cash and short-term investments — the balance sheet that funds this deal.
The next hard checkpoints are the second-half 2026 profitability target for financial services, the regulatory approvals needed to close by the third quarter of 2027, and the earn-out metrics that will determine what Grab ultimately pays for the remaining 40%. Until the segment prints positive adjusted EBITDA, the raised 2028 targets remain a forecast rather than a result.
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