Bhavish Aggarwal, the founder and CEO of the ride hailing startup Ola Cabs, announced on Friday, July 5, that the ride-hailing company has completely departed from Google Maps and switched to Ola Maps, its proprietary navigation system.
Aggarwal stated in a post on X that Ola Cabs will be able to avoid paying Google INR 100 crore in fees a year thanks to the change.
“After the Azure exit last month, we’ve now fully exited Google Maps. We used to spend INR 100 crore a year, but we’ve made that 0 this month by moving completely to our in-house Ola maps!” Bhavish Aggarwal expressed in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
Features of 'Ola maps'
He also hinted at future features, stating that Ola Maps will "soon" add features like street view, indoor images, 3D maps, drone maps, and NeRFs (neural radiance fields).
Aggarwal also revealed in the same post that Ola Maps' application programming interfaces (APIs) will be accessible on Krutrim, its sibling AI cloud platform.
'Google' maps to 'Ola' maps
Six months after Ola Electric commercially launched Ola Maps in January of this year with the release of the Move OS 4 software platform for its electric two-wheelers, the company has decided to switch to an in-house navigation platform.
The company has spent more than a year developing its own navigation platform. The mobility startup had announced last year that it was working on creating a specific mapping system for its cars and applications. Ola Cabs appears to have discovered opportunities for collaboration with Ola Maps and implemented them into its ride-hailing application.
LinkedIn Fiasco
The Ola Cabs CEO stated at the time in May that the change was a reaction to Microsoft-owned LinkedIn removing his post in which he referred to the use of the pronoun "they" as an "illness."
Strangely, the move to Ola Maps coincides with Aggarwal's announcement two months ago that the mobility platform would be shifting its IT workload from Microsoft's Azure cloud to Krutrim's cloud.
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