In 2018, Southeast Asia's ride-hailing landscape had just been redrawn overnight. Grab had absorbed Uber's entire regional business across eight countries.
The consolidation had consequences that drivers felt almost immediately. In Singapore, fares rose between 10 and 15% within months of the Grab-Uber merger. In Vietnam, Grab drivers would later strike over sudden commission hikes. And with this imbalance of power sitting with a couple of platforms, there was greater lattitude to spike commissions, introduce surge pricing and scale back driver incentives. That narrowing of choice was Tada's entry point into the market.
Launched in Singapore just months after the Grab-Uber deal, the platform set out to change how value is distributed within the ride-hailing model.
Campaign Asia-Pacific sat down with Kay Woo, co-founder of Tada, to understand how that model has played out.
What marketing looks like when you can't outspend rivals
Instead of taking a percentage cut from each fare, Tada charges drivers a flat fee per ride, typically around a dollar, regardless of trip value. In practice, this changes how drivers earn and how pricing behaves. Woo is clear-eyed about how that translates into brand positioning. "If you see us as just a ride-hailing player, maybe it doesn't make any sense. Same service, maybe slightly cheaper, sometimes not—what's the difference?" he asks. The difference, he argues, is its proposition.
Today, Tada operates across Singapore, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Hong Kong, with Denver launched in July 2025, and New York City slated for June 2026—the expansion was made possible without the financial firepower of incumbents.
To put in context, rival Grab's advertising ecosystem, GrabAds, reached a run-rate of US$216 million by 2024, with the number of active advertisers on its self-serve platform up 31% YoY. Meanwhile, Grab spent nearly US$2 billion on partner and consumer incentives that same year, including cash bonuses, promo codes, fare subsidies, and loyalty rewards to keep drivers online and riders booking. By 2025, that figure had climbed to US$2.3 billion.
For the first three years of operation, Tada had no substantial marketing budget. The app's model makes a different argument entirely: that if the terms are fair from the outset, loyalty doesn't need to be bought. What it had instead was a Telegram group. When Tada entered Singapore, Woo's first move was to build a driver community: meeting them for coffee and lunch, answering questions, and listening to complaints.
"If you don't have any contact point with drivers and users, there's no way they can understand what you're trying to do," he observes. "But with sincere explanation and an emotional connection with drivers every single day, one convinced driver will spread the word to others."
That community-first model is now the company's primary brand infrastructure. When Tada does spend on above-the-line advertising, it does so with a distinct brand voice. The app's 2024 out-of-home campaign, created with UltraSuperNew, ran with a cheeky descriptor across Singapore's MRT trains and bus stops: "Download TADA. Singapore's second, sometimes third favourite ride-hailing app."
The self-deprecating honesty stopped commuters mid-scroll, sparked Reddit threads, and prompted LinkedIn debate among marketing professionals about whether radical candour was the sharpest tool in a challenger brand's kit. The follow-up campaign in 2026, 'Never Be Squeezed Again', called on drivers and riders to reject commission-heavy platforms outright.
Woo is blunt: "When the big platforms do something unfair—squeeze drivers or hike fares—we speak up loudly. You don't have to bluff people that you're strong or fast. We know who we are. Based on that, we deliver the message."
In Singapore, the platform now holds a 13% to 15% market share—substantial enough but dwarfed by giants like Grab. Still, Woo is adamant that the advantage of entering a market that Grab and Gojek have spent millions shaping is that consumer education is already done. Riders know how ride-hailing works, while drivers are painfully aware of the commission structure.
He added: "What we need to do is focus on the problems that people are facing right now, which means high fares, which means high commission. We need to communicate this is cheaper, same quality, and drivers can make more money."
The model behind the message
Southeast Asia's super-app model, where a single platform offers services from rides to food to finance to advertising, has made it difficult for single-vertical players to compete on visibility, loyalty programmes, and cross-subsidised pricing. Grab and Gojek have all these functions, giving them levers that a pure ride-hailing player simply doesn't have.
Woo's answer to this disadvantage isn't to expand verticals. Rather than competing with super-apps by adding more services, Tada's model rests on a leaner proposition: treat drivers as the core asset, not a cost to be managed, and the network builds itself. "We position ourselves as the mobility infrastructure," he argues. "We are positioning our drivers as the core pillars of our infrastructure that can be connected to any services by nature of our protocol."
While conventional platforms act as intermediaries extracting a percentage of every fare, Tada charges drivers a platform fee of between S$1.05 and S$1.25 per ride. This means Tada's fares are roughly 10–15% cheaper for users, while drivers earn more per trip, replacing the percentage-based commission model.
The underpinning came from Tada's blockchain protocol, the Mass Vehicle Ledger (MVL), which Woo built in 2017 to create open records of driver earnings and trip data. "The core philosophy of blockchain is transparency," he argues. "And fairness is essentially a follower of transparency. Once you make everything crystal clear, there's no room to hide something and be greedy."
In a category that runs on price sensitivity, this transparency also functions as brand equity. It's also the reason why the driver acquisition cost for Tada is near zero, Woo notes.
"Once sceptical drivers confirmed that the zero commission promise was real, they became our most loyal supporters," he observes. Some 90% of the overall driver pool in Singapore now offers their services on Tada, he adds.
The ride-hailing industry's relationship with profit has always been strained. Grab posted its first net profit in 2025 after over a decade of losses. Meanwhile, GoTo has not yet turned a profit. Fare surges, reduced driver incentives, and quietly clawed-back loyalty perks have shaped brand reputation.
For a category built on trust, the pursuit of profit has become a liability, and for consumers, an unsustainable model means unpredictable pricing and eroding service quality.
Woo's argument is that the conventional model is incapable of being scalable, sustainable, and fair. Tada's parent company MVL recorded US$19.8 million in global revenue as of October 2024, up 26% from the previous year. Woo says Singapore operations have been profitable for the past three years without cross-market subsidies.
The ethical positioning risk and why Tada argues there isn't one
While fairness is a compelling brand platform, there are real risks to an ethical positioning in a price-driven category. Does building a brand on fairness offer a bold differentiator or a ceiling to growing at scale?
"We don't sell our brand to users. We sell our proposition," he says. "Users choose our service not because of values, but because it's cheaper."
Rather than spending on a conventional brand activation, Tada launched a SG$1 million 'Hotpot' initiative instead. In 2025, the community-driven reward system distributed incentives directly to drivers based on blockchain-verified trip records. In its first week, more than 8,000 drivers completed nearly 29,000 trips. The campaign's results showed pledged drivers earning more than 150% compared with non-pledged drivers, with Tada contributing nearly S$260,000 in incentives.
The ethical positioning, in other words, is the mechanism that delivers the commercial outcome, not a separate layer of purpose-washing applied on top, Woo explains. Fairness isn't the story Tada tells, he adds; rather, it's the reason the product works.
Whether that converts to sustained mainstream scale is still being tested. Woo says Tada is expanding to New York City from June 2026. In a city where a driver taking home US$45 on a US$100 fare has become a norm, and where Uber and Lyft hold a combined near-total duopoly, the "pain level" for drivers is, by Woo's own measure, "extreme."
The same community-building playbook that worked in Singapore launched in New York: a WhatsApp group, direct conversations with drivers, and the same zero-commission promise. He observes: "Others who know us from Southeast Asia are vouching for us in the chat. Once you touch the fire, it just spreads with the wind. You can't stop it."
Woo is candid that not every market has been executed with the full playbook. But the model that consistently delivers is always the same: community first, proof of promise second, growth third. "We spend less, we make more, and then we make a profit," he adds.
Source: Campaign Asia-Pacific
