How MapmyIndia Is Challenging Google Maps In India With Its GPS and Map Services

Year 1994. A husband-wife duo. An impossible dream: to digitally map all 3,287,263 square kilometers of India. The result? A Delhi-based GPS navigation company called MapmyIndia.25 years of research, a team of more than 400 surveyors, post-physical and satellite surveys and the company now has a repository of more than 2 Cr data points, including 3D data visualisations, telematics, and navigation systems under its belt. All this via a customer-funded business model. Their journey began with Coca Cola coming onboard as an enterprise customer. Later on, they counted players like Marico, Hindustan Unilever, and the Indian Defence services as their eneterprise customers.  The number of enterprise customers for MapmyIndia grew to 500 by the early 2000s.After three years, the company launched a pan-India GPS navigation device in 2007, called MapMyIndia navigator. This was different from the web portal, because now users had a device in their cars that they could just follow to reach their desired destination. It offered turn-by-turn assistance in real-time, to the destination. This move led the company to capture a vast amount of the automotive market share. Car companies started offering the company’s GPS device as an add-on, an additional accessory.The company very consciously decided to go freemium for its API stack. When asked why, Rohan replied that it was done to increase their reach. “We were sizeably profitable and were significantly making good revenues. So, the next logical step was to increase our reach and that only happens when you give the users the freedom and the ability to choose from the best possible option. That has led to a big rise in developers adopting our APIs.”Says Rohan, “Most of my adult life has been spent seeing Google Maps do things after we have done and gain more visibility. The way we have tried to address that is: our maps have to be much better and the solutions that we offer have to be of great value. We have not played by the same business model.”It has seen a 40% y-o-y growth for the past decade. The expected turnover for FY 2017-18 is pegged at $30 Mn (INR 200 Cr). The company is targeting to achieve a turnover of $155 Mn (INR 1,000 Cr) with 30% PAT ( (Profit After Tax) in the next five years or so.eLoc will potentially help various industries in India including logistics, cab aggregators and ecommerce, which collectively form a major portion of the country’s evolving digital sector. Personalisation and localisation are the two major factors that MapMyIndia aims to provide efficiency to, via using the new eLoc feature. As of now, nearly 2 Cr points have been mapped under the same.MapmyIndia is also playing a key role in developing smart cities and Swacch Bharat initiatives. The company recently implemented India’s first GPS Guided Biometric System for the staff and Safaai Karmchaaris of the Ambala Municipal Corporation.A real-view. A digital twin of the real world. This ultimate map, this big mission that we have is to build a digital map of the real world, where we have modelled the real world. A full 360-degree, indoor, outdoor, where we have an idea of how the world functions. The idea is that one day, the digital twin of the world has to be made, for digital world experience. And we really believe this.”

In 1993, after being un-banned in India, Coca-Cola acquired the Indian cola company Thumbs Up and found itself with a problem unfamiliar to companies accustomed to developed markets: very few accurate maps existed at that point. Thumbs Up had a vast network of bottlers, each with an assigned distribution territory, but nothing depicted the overlapping of boundaries of the territories (descriptions such as “along the river” substituted for maps). Not surprisingly though, Coca-Cola wasn’t the only multinational facing such a cartographical dilemma in India: for example, a joint venture of Essar and Cellular One was struggling to figure out where to place cell phone towers.