Welcome back to Asia Tech Review, your curated digest to keep up to date with tech news across Asia.

Grab’s rumoured deal to buy Atome has come through, giving us the Singapore’s firm’s largest acquisition to date, a notable Southeast Asia exit and a new reason for Grab to convince us that it will finally come good on its fintech growth promise, nearly 5 years after going public.

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Grab announced plans to acquire Atome Financial in a deal that values the Singapore-based buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) provider at upwards of $2 billion.

The deal was first reported by Bloomberg last week, and now that it is official the full details will see Grab acquire an initial 60% of Atome for $1.49 billion. The remaining 40% will be acquired by Grab over the next two years at a valuation of between $2 billion and $4.5 billion based on how Atome performs. All in all, Grab could pay a total of nearly $3.3 billion for the business, although half of the second transaction would be in cash so the total would also depend on Grab’s share price performance. Ultimately, this leaves skin in the game for Atome’s founders, staff and investors.

Grab is buying Atome to beef up its fintech business, which had always been the potential growth engine but hasn’t hit that potential since Grab went public nearly five years ago, as noted during Q2 earnings in August:

Revenue from Grab’s financial services business grew by 59% year-on-year in Q2, having grown 43% in Q1. But it accounts for just $134 million of its total $997 million revenue right now.

Adding Atome brings BNPL services across five major Southeast Asian countries and adds directly to the early promise of Grab’s lending business. That loanbook is expected to more than double from $2.3 billion right now to over $6 billion by 2028. There’s clearly overlap and synergy, the question is whether the two companies can integrate and scale sufficiently to add serious revenue.

The deal seems obvious in hindsight, given Grab’s cash reserves and growing appetite for M&A, as we said last week:

Grab has more than $5 billion in cash to spend and, as we’ve said repeatedly, it will use that for strategic M&A. It made a series of investments in autonomous vehicle tech last year, acquired US-based investment platform Stash and it is moving into a new market with the $600 million purchase of Foodpanda Taiwan.

Looking more broadly, this acquisition is important for Southeast Asia for a few reasons.

Exits, exits, exits.

Yes, $3 billion is a big one. Southeast Asia has been starved of exits of any size, let alone those that return decent money to investors. It may not be the tens of billions level, but it will put the region on the map, and give those who backed Atome a solid return that isn’t just on paper.

Secondly, this is a rare deal happening within the region. You don’t often see local market consolidation, it’s typically outsiders coming in (for example, US-based Circle buying Singapore’s Tazapay this month) and we’ve never seen a local-local transaction at this scale. Companies outside of Southeast Asia don’t know the region like those inside it do and they have less reason to shop here, we need to see more of this at scale.

Founders and VCs I spoke to are hopeful that Tazapay’s sale for $400 million and Grab-Atome will signify an uptick in deals and sentiment. Southeast Asia certainly needs both.

As for Grab, investors aren’t buying it yet. Grab’s share price is down nearly 4% since the announcement, nearly 19% over the past month, and even Jim Cramer had a dismissive few words to say. But that might not be a bad thing.

Atome is an Ellerton client, this analysis is based on public facts and prior reporting. For more, read our disclaimer.

If you want more Southeast Asia insights, check out Offline Network Southeast Asia, a new YouTube live show where Singapore-based VC Wing Vasiksiri and I interview founders, VC and operators from the region. The show runs Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6-7pm Singapore time with highlights posted on social media.

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India’s UPI has been lauded as an example of what modern digital payments infrastructure looks like and can do at scale. It’s revolutionised the way money moves in the country, thanks also to the explosion of affordable internet and smartphones. Now, though, it is in a controversial moment after announcing plans to introduce merchant fees for the first time.

Starting 15 October, the National Payments Corporation of India, which operates the network, will charge a 0.4% merchant fee on certain payments above ₹2,000, or around $21. Merchant fees will be capped at ₹300 (about $3) for transactions of ₹75,000 (around $783) or more, while payments of ₹2,000 or less will remain free. Likewise, smaller merchants that receive no more than ₹100,000 (about $1,041) per month via UPI will be exempt from the charges.

For reference, credit card merchant fees typically range from 1.5% to 2.5% per transaction, while debit card fees are capped at 0.9%, according to information released by NPCI.

Kunal Shah@kunalb11

This is a great step forward.

ReserveBankOfIndia @RBI

The introduction of MDR on large-value UPI transactions (i.e., above ₹2,000) is an important step towards strengthening the long-term sustainability of India’s digital payments ecosystem. It will help UPI in continuing to scale, innovate and serve consumers and businesses across

5:35 PM · Sep 15, 2026 · 352K Views

411 Replies · 76 Reposts · 1.58K Likes

The measures seem reasonable and made with the aim of long-term sustainability. However, the communication hasn’t been clear. A previous leak made the exact plans and rates unclear, and there’s even been wild claims that India is kowtowing to the demands of US payment companies… to keep things more competitive?… can’t really understand that one…

There’s an interesting argument that banks can afford it since they are saving spend since ATM withdrawal volume is lower, but broadly this feels like an approach that has its merits. They just don’t appear to have been clearly explained or understood. Any situation that involves taking away something people enjoyed for free is going to cause criticism, and so that has come to pass.

Antler, Bertelsmann India Investments, Jungle Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and Kae Capital are among the funds stepping up deeptech investments in India, where startups have raised $574 million across 61 deals this year [Economic Times]

China’s Ligent Technologies, which makes fibre optic communications equipment, is reportedly seeking HK$5.67 billion ($723 million) in a Hong Kong IPO to expand production, it already has $340 million in cornerstone backing [Reuters]

DeepSeek is hiring GL Ventures partner Yan Wentao as its first CFO perhaps in preparation for a future IPO [Reuters]

Shanghai Biren Technology, a Chinese Nvidia alternative, is weighing another $1 billion share sale [Bloomberg]

Japan’s Kioxia is said to be considering raising at least $10 billion through a US listing of American depositary receipts [Bloomberg]

It isn’t public yet but ByteDance’s first-half net profit reportedly fell by a single-digit percentage to about $20 billion as it stepped up AI spending—revenue rose around 30% to $120 billion [The Information]

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix rejected a proposal to prepay about 25 trillion won ($18 billion) of electricity bills to help fund grids for South Korea’s new semiconductor and AI clusters [KED Global]

Japan’s Kioxia-linked startup EmotionX is preparing a cloud service built on fully homomorphic encryption, allowing data to be analysed without being decrypted [Nikkei Asia]

OpenRouter launched In-Region Routing to enable US customers to keep AI requests and data inside the country as Chinese open-weight models gain traction on its platform [The New Stack]

MediaTek is working with customers to make its mobile chips more efficient as memory shortages raise component costs [Nikkei Asia]

Hong Kong’s data-centre ambitions have hit a financing test after the sole bidder for a Sandy Ridge site sought HK$20 billion ($2.6 billion) to fund the project [Bloomberg]

Hong Kong-founded CoinEx is shutting down after a prolonged crypto-market downturn and rising compliance costs, months after a report showed the exchange was popular with Iranian users [WSJ]

US prosecutors say two Chinese companies used Binance accounts to launder $61 million from Iranian oil sales, part of more than $1.5 billion in alleged illicit proceeds [FT]

Hanoi police fined a resident who urged Grab drivers to stop work in protest, saying the posts spread unverified information about the Singapore-based ride-hailing company [TechNode]

China will create a BRICS open-source AI community and expand cooperation on large language models, President Xi Jinping said at the bloc’s summit in New Delhi [CNBC]

Beijing will ban recreational drones and drone parts from November 15 after a light plane crashed into the city’s tallest skyscraper, a buyback programme will offer owners up to 3,000 yuan ($447) to part with their drone [Bloomberg]

India’s consumer regulator is examining Apple’s warranty terms after claims that an iOS 18 update damaged iPhones and left users with expensive repair bills [Reuters]

Indian police will question Google after uncovering a network that created more than 500,000 Gmail accounts to send hoax bomb threats, with two people arrested [Reuters]

Norwegian authorities are investigating whether Telenor aided crimes against humanity through its former work with Myanmar’s military regime, including concerns over customer data [The Record]

Tesla set up a Vietnam unit in Ho Chi Minh City that can import, export and distribute vehicles, laying groundwork for a move into the domestic EV market that’s dominated by local powerhouse VinFast [Nikkei Asia]

Chinese hackers-for-hire are operating increasingly like private intelligence agencies, using AI and other tools to steal material for the country’s security services [WSJ]

Waymo, Japanese taxi app GO and Nihon Kotsu are targeting Japan’s first fully autonomous commercial taxi service in Tokyo in 2027, initially with a small fleet [Reuters]

Amazon India’s quick-commerce unit Now has crossed a $1 billion annualised sales run rate a little over a year after launch, and plans to reach 100 cities and 1,000 dark stores by year-end [Economic Times]

ICBC’s London branch helped Huawei move $1 billion out of the UK days after the US indicted the Chinese tech giant, bypassing internal checks to support a Beijing favourite [ICIJ]