Theo Vassilakis is the Group Chief Technology Officer of Grab. He sets the strategic direction for the technology team at Grab, oversees the growth of Grab’s products and services as well as the further development of its machine learning, data science and engineering capabilities. Prior to joining Grab, Theo has led large, multi-site teams, including BigQuery/Dremel now in Google Cloud Platform, and Cosmos/Scope now in Azure Data Lake Analytics. Within Facebook’s Oculus Research and Microsoft Research, he has led and worked on cutting edge eorts including a backend for Augmented Reality - scaling computer vision (SLAM, 3D reconstruction) into distributed cloud infrastructure - as well as data mining and exploration for Microsoft SQL Server.

As an entrepreneur, he co-founded Metanautix, a big data analytics startup funded by Sequoia Capital and acquired by Microsoft. He has co-authored inuential research papers on Dremel, written for industry publications, served on research program committees, and appeared as a panelist on various topics. Theo holds a B.Sc. from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. from Brown University, both in pure Mathematics. After having moved to the United States from his native Athens, Greece in the early 90s, Theo and his family are invigorated by the new adventures that their move to Southeast Asia will bring. In his spare time, Theo enjoys experimenting with hardware through a variety of projects, ranging from a prototype human input device to quadcopters for indoor spaces.