It was a rainy Tuesday morning, a bad time for taxis in Singapore, and I had used GrabTaxi, the new app that’s been grabbing attention in this tiny city state that still manages to chalk up 700,000 taxi trips a day (according to a datapoint shared by Uber at last year’s WIT Conference).

Within a minute or so, I had “grabbed” a taxi and within 3-5 minutes, it was at my pick-up point.

When I first started using GrabTaxi a couple of months ago, the experience was disappointing. It seldom worked especially when you were in remote locations. Very few drivers were using it but like with all new technology, it happens gradually, gradually and then suddenly …

And so suddenly, GrabTaxi has become a verb among drivers in Singapore. My driver, 40 years old, is one of the 100 Elite GrabTaxi drivers – that means he grabs up to 60 calls a week. He then gets incentives such as free smartphones or extra money paid directly into his bank account. 

His income, he says, has almost doubled because of GrabTaxi. He now drives 7-8 hours a day, instead of 12, and he takes a break after he’s hit his quota for the day. In fact, after me, he was headed home for an early lunch.

A former shipping man, he’s been driving for three years and thinks GrabTaxi is the best thing to have happened to taxi drivers like him who do not work for the largest taxi company in town, Comfort and City Cab.

What GrabTaxi has done is aggregate demand and push it out to taxi drivers, allowing them to monetize their spare capacity. For every booking, he told me, GrabTaxi takes 30 cents, a lower amount than the booking fee the driver would have to pay his own company.

“The good thing about GrabTaxi is that it tells us the passenger’s destination,” he said.

He’s one of the early adopters of GrabTaxi. “They approached us at Changi airport and showed us how to use the app. Us younger ones were the first to use it,” he said.

But older taxi drivers are also grabbing. The other evening I was picked up by a 60-something driver who told me he’d been using the app for two weeks and was already taking in about $1,000 more in income. “I want to make it to Elite status,” he said.

GrabTaxi is certainly making headlines in tiny Singapore where taxis have long been a pain point for commuters. It is shaking up the market and giving Singapore’s largest taxi operator a run for its money.

By aggressive recruitment and offering incentives to drivers, it’s built up a growing pool of drivers (making it the second largest fleet of taxis but I think soon to be largest) and its app is so easy to use. Three clicks literally and you’re done and you can see where the driver is on your smartphone.

Taxi apps such as GrabTaxi are certainly getting the attention of investors. Last October, Vertex Venture Holdings, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Temasek Holdings, announced it was leading a group of angel investors in Malaysia to inject additional funding into start-up GrabTaxi and hinted at “an eight-figure US dollar sum”.

Started in Malaysia, MyTeksi now covers 12 cities in five countries, including Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

When it launched in Singapore, founder and group CEO Anthony Tan, whose grandfather was responsible for setting up one of Malaysia’s first cab companies, said, “Since the mobile app was first publicly launched in 2012, there has been an amazing response from commuters around Southeast Asia. The ease-of-use and safety aspects made it an instant favorite among commuters in Malaysia and the Philippines with one GrabTaxi cab being booked every five seconds in those markets.”

It’s certainly being watched by companies such as Blue Bird, which has 21,000 cars serving 8.5 million passengers a month in Indonesia. Although president director Noni Purnomo said at WIT Indonesia that she wasn’t that concerned about such taxi apps, there can be no doubt that they will disrupt the market as it has done Singapore.

At WIT Japan, Allen Penn (left), head of Uber for Asia Pacific, was also asked if he was concerned about the disruption from local taxi apps and while he said that the power of a global brand cannot be under-estimated, you’d have to be uber silly not to watch these players who have local knowledge and the ability to execute at ground level.

Time will tell though if regulators will step in and spoil the fun. For now, grab and be grabbed by the latest disruption unfolding on the streets of South-east Asia.