Ken Mandel leads Grab's B2B businesses across eight Southeast Asian markets, with responsibility for GrabAds and Enterprise.
His commercial remit spans advertising, merchant relationships, Grab for Business and the commercial, partnership and strategy teams behind Grab's merchant solutions.
Ken founded GrabAds in 2018 and built it into one of Asia's largest retail media networks, connecting brands to Grab's users from first impression to last mile delivery. Today he is part of the leadership group driving Grab's expansion into ecommerce and its monetisation.
Ken is a leading voice on agentic commerce, the shift from marketing to people to marketing to the artificial intelligence (AI) agents that shop for them. His 2025 article, 'Marketing in the Age of AI Agents: Who Are You Advertising To?', was featured in Benedict Evans's newsletter and quoted by Bloomberg.
His career spans more than 30 years of building commerce, advertising and technology businesses across Asia Pacific. Before Grab he was President of eCommerce for Publicis Media in APAC, where he co-founded Publicis Commerce and helped shape what became the retail media model. Earlier he launched Hootsuite in Asia Pacific as its first regional employee, and before that launched Buddy Media in the region, becoming Managing Director, APAC of Salesforce Marketing Cloud after Salesforce acquired the company in 2012.
At Yahoo he served first as Vice President and Regional Managing Director for Southeast Asia, running the full P&L and opening four new country offices, and then as Regional Vice President of Advertising Sales and Marketplace for Asia Pacific, leading monetisation across 12 markets and a 500 person sales organisation. He began his leadership career at XM Asia Pacific (acquired by WPP), building it into one of the region's leading digital consultancies and expanding it into Greater China.
Ken was founding chairman of IAB Southeast Asia, founding vice chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) Asia Pacific and chairman of Singapore's Digital Advertising Alliance. He co-chairs the MMA's Retail Media Network committee, invests in and mentors founders through JAM Ventures, and advises technology companies including Braze (NASDAQ: BRZE) and BandLab.
He is Canadian, has lived in Asia since 1994, and holds degrees from McGill University and the Asia Pacific Management Co-operative Program in Vancouver.
