Grab has agreed to buy 60% of Atome Financial for $1.49 billion in cash, with closing expected by the third quarter of 2027. The first-stage payment is not simply consideration to existing shareholders: $260 million is primary growth capital that will go into Atome itself.
That structure makes the simple $1.49 billion divided by 60% valuation shortcut misleading. Grab has also committed to acquire the remaining 40% roughly two years after the first closing, but that price is not fixed today. It will be based on Atome's performance in the six months before the second closing.
The formula weights a 13.0x multiple of annualized adjusted EBITDA at 75% and a 2.5x multiple of annualized revenue at 25%, with the resulting equity valuation floored at $2.0 billion and capped at $4.5 billion. At least half of the second-stage consideration will be paid in cash. Grab is therefore buying control at a known first-stage price while leaving a meaningful part of the ultimate purchase cost exposed to the earnings Atome produces before full ownership.
The deal accelerates a lending strategy that is already capital intensive
Atome brings a roughly $1 billion gross loan portfolio as of June 2026 across BNPL, cash loans, cards and digital lending. Grab already had a $2.32 billion gross loan portfolio in its Financial Services segment in the second quarter, up 197% year on year after the consolidation of Superbank and growth in its own lending businesses.
The combined direction is explicit. Grab now expects Financial Services to exceed $6 billion of gross loans and generate about $500 million of adjusted EBITDA in 2028, including Atome. It also raised its group 2028 adjusted EBITDA target to $1.7 billion.
Those targets are more useful than the ecosystem rhetoric because they show how much of Grab's future earnings ambition is migrating toward balance-sheet businesses. Financial Services produced $134 million of second-quarter revenue but was still at a $15 million segment adjusted EBITDA loss. Atome can accelerate the path to scale, but a larger loan book also increases sensitivity to funding costs, provisioning and borrower losses.
Grab says Atome's delinquency rates have been stable or improving across borrower cohorts and describes its provisioning as prudent. Those are management statements based on unaudited Atome accounts. The acquisition does not disclose a full vintage loss curve, funding spread or return on equity that would let shareholders independently underwrite the enlarged credit book.
Grab is committing cash to control a lender, injecting fresh capital into that lender and agreeing to buy the rest at a formula linked to future profitability. The structure avoids fixing today's price for all of Atome, but it also makes credit returns a larger part of Grab's equity story. The $500 million financial-services EBITDA target only creates value if the expanded loan book earns it after funding costs and losses.