Abhishek Shetty joins Grab as regional director and head of product marketing

SINGAPORE: Grab has a new marketing hand at the wheel, and he comes with an 18-year scar tissue of building brands from scratch. Abhishek Shetty, until recently marketing head at Swiggy Instamart, Noice and Pvt Brands, has joined the Southeast Asian super-app as regional director and head of product marketing, based out of Singapore.

The brief is broad, deliberately so. Shetty will oversee product marketing across Grab’s markets and business lines: mobility, deliveries, financial services, commerce and, notably, the emerging suite of AI-powered experiences the company is building out. The job, in essence, is to keep consumer insight from getting lost between the product roadmap and the go-to-market plan, and to make sure adoption and growth follow once something ships.

It is a logical next step. At Swiggy Instamart, Shetty spent over two years shaping marketing and private brands inside one of India’s most competitive, fastest-moving consumer categories, a stint that ran from February 2024 to May 2026. Before that came a year as a fractional chief marketing officer for startups including Pepper Money (now Fab Money), Fishbowl and Stader. Further back still, a two-year run at Sony Pictures Networks India saw him head brand marketing, content marketing and communications for SonyLIV across India, the EU, MENA and SAARC, steering campaigns around Shark Tank, the Olympics and marquee cricket and tennis properties.

His longest stretch, though, was at Celio, the French menswear label, where he spent over four years as chief marketing officer and, latterly, head of ecommerce and omni-channel sales, delivering a 21 per cent CAGR in top-line growth and a 60 per cent jump in the bottom line over three years. Earlier roles at Bestseller’s Jack & Jones, Mid Day Infomedia and Saatchi & Saatchi rounded out a career built almost entirely on the demand side of consumer business.

Shetty credited Sulin Lau for backing the move and Rina Lee for making it happen, and said he was looking forward to working alongside Philipp Kandal, Sean Goh and Grab’s wider teams. He also continues as a board advisor to the India Influencer Governing Council, a part-time role he has held since February 2025.

For Grab, the appointment signals an intent to tighten the link between consumer behaviour and product decisions at a moment when the company is layering AI-driven features across its ride-hailing, delivery, payments and commerce stack. For Shetty, it is a bet that the instincts honed in India’s brutal quick commerce and D2C markets travel well to a region with rather different competitive dynamics, but a similarly demanding consumer.