Ola Transitions to Ola Maps, Offers Free Access to Developers

Indian ride-hailing giant Ola has announced its exit from Google Maps in favour of its proprietary solution, Ola Maps. The company's co-founder and CEO, Bhavish Aggarwal, revealed its transition to in-house Ola Maps in a recent post on X (formerly Twitter) after announcing it in April, highlighting significant cost savings and improved performance metrics.

Aggarwal stated, "We used to spend 100 crores a year, but we've made that 0 this month by moving completely to our in-house Ola Maps!" This transition follows Ola's earlier move from Microsoft Azure to its cloud infrastructure, Krutrim.

While the move promises significant cost savings for Ola by eliminating Google Maps API fees, running an in-house mapping solution will involve substantial deployment and maintenance costs.

Ola Maps is built on a diverse set of data sources, including real-time information from millions of vehicles, a fleet of Ola S1 scooters equipped with 360-degree cameras, open-source government data repositories, OpenStreetMap, and proprietary sources. Ola has also highlighted its commitment to open-source contributions, reporting 5.43 million edits to OpenStreetMap in the past year alone.

According to Ola, the new mapping solution outperforms competitors in key areas such as location accuracy, search accuracy, search latency, and ETA accuracy. The company claims its AI-first data systems process over 5 million messages per second from various sensors and telemetry sources.

Aggarwal emphasized the importance of addressing India-specific challenges that Western mapping applications often struggle with, including complex street naming conventions, rapid urban changes, and non-standard road conditions.

To encourage adoption among developers, Ola is offering one year of free access to Ola Maps through its Krutrim platform, amounting to over ₹100 crore in free credits.

Aggarwal has also announced plans to introduce more features to Ola Maps, including street view, neural radiance fields (NERFs), indoor images, 3D maps, and drone maps.