Grab group CEO and cofounder Anthony Tan is taking the superapp company to its next stage, including a planned transformation into a public company and growing its presence in fintech.

When the pandemic struck last year, superapp giant Grab’s ride-hailing business took a hit in Southeast Asia amid lockdowns and restrictions. “The first thing we thought about was how do we make sure that our driver partners could quickly pivot and that their incomes were at least supported in some shape or form,” says Grab group CEO and cofounder Anthony Tan in an exclusive interview with Forbes Asia, by video call. The solution? “Stop thinking it’s business as usual,” says Tan, 39.

Tan says Grab asked its drivers to transport meals as well as people as pandemic-induced demand for food delivery spiked in the region (and worldwide). “We converted over 140,000 drivers in a very short period of time,” says Tan, including around 18,000 drivers in Malaysia in a single day. Tan credits this flexibility to Grab’s superapp strategy—customers only need one app if they want to order pizzas instead of rides. As Grab says about itself: “We’re an all-in-one platform.”

“Whether you are in ride-hailing, e-commerce delivery, GrabFood, GrabMart, it was literally a tab, you just switch on the tab [inside the app],” Tan says. “Grab’s business became actually even more resilient because we are the only player across the region that has this multi-vertical ability.”

Now Grab Holdings, with its main headquarters in Singapore, is poised for another transition in its journey from when Tan and his cofounder Tan Hooi Ling (no relation) launched the MyTeksi app in 2012 in his native Malaysia. Grab is expected to go public on Nasdaq via a merger with a SPAC sponsored by Altimeter Growth by year-end. If all goes according to plan, it will be the world’s largest SPAC deal, raising $4.5 billion and giving Grab a post-money equity value of $40 billion, according to public filings. Altimeter did not respond to requests for comment. Grab declined to comment on the SPAC deal.

Another group with a keen interest in Grab’s future are the investors who have pumped more than $12 billion into the company before the SPAC merger, including A-list backers such as GGV Capital, SoftBank and Toyota.