Ola Cabs Exits Google Maps, Moves To In-House Navigation Platform Ola Maps

Mobility startup Ola Cabs’ founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal on Friday (July 5) said that the ride-hailing startup has fully exited Google Maps and moved to its in-house navigation platform, Ola Maps. 

In a post on X, Aggarwal claimed that the move will enable Ola Cabs to save INR 100 Cr annually in charges payable to Google. 

“After Azure exit last month, we’ve now fully exited google maps. We used to spend INR 100 Cr a year but we’ve made that 0 this month by moving completely to our in-house Ola maps!” said Aggarwal in a post. 

Teasing additional functionalities, he also said that Ola Maps will also “soon” add more features such as street view, NeRFs (neural radiance fields), indoor images, 3D maps, drone maps, among others.

In the same post, Aggarwal also announced that application programming interface (APIs) for Ola Maps will be available on its sister AI cloud platform Krutrim. 

The move to shift to the in-house navigation platform comes six months after Ola Electric commercially launched Ola Maps in January this year, with the roll out of the Move OS 4 software platform for its electric two-wheelers.

The company’s in-house navigation platform has been in the making for more than a year now. Last year, the mobility startup had said that it was developing a dedicated maps system for its vehicles and apps. It now looks like Ola Cabs too has found synergies with Ola Maps and deployed it for use on its ride-hailing app. 

Curiously, the shift to Ola Maps also comes two months after Aggarwal publicly said that the mobility platform would move its IT workload from Microsoft’s Azure to Krutrim’s cloud. At the time in May, the Ola Cabs boss had said that the shift was in response to Microsoft-owned LinkedIn pulling down his post that termed the usage of the pronoun ‘they’ as an “illness”.

The shift to an in-house platform will help Ola trim losses and help its further scale up Ola Maps. Ola parent ANI Technologies reported a consolidated net loss of INR 772.2 Cr in the financial year 2022-23 (FY23) down nearly half from INR 1,522.3 Cr in the previous fiscal year. Meanwhile, operating revenue rose 42% year-on-year (YoY) to INR 2,799.3 Cr .

The development also comes close on the heels of the mobility platform shoring up its ecommerce play on the back of its partnership with Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC). Last month, the startup was said to be planning to roll out its grocery delivery through the network.

Meanwhile, its sister firm and EV juggernaut Ola Electric has been gearing for an initial public offering (IPO). In June, it received Securities and Exchange Board of India’s (SEBI) approval for a public listing that will comprise a fresh issuance of shares worth INR 5,500 Cr and an offer for sale (OFS) component of up to 9.51 Cr shares.