Ola Maps navigating beyond 'western apps'

Bhavish Aggarwal urges developers to shift from Google Maps, offers Rs 100 crore in credits

Bhavish Aggarwal, founder and chief executive officer of Ola, is encouraging developers to switch from Google Maps to Ola Maps.

Ola is offering developers a year of free access to Ola Maps on the company’s Krutrim Cloud and over Rs 100 crore in free credits.

This initiative comes after Ola replaced Google Maps with its own Ola Maps, leading to annual savings of around Rs 100 crore.

Aggarwal also recently migrated Ola’s workload from Microsoft Azure to Krutrim Cloud.

"After #ExitAzure, it’s time for Indian developers to #ExitGoogleMaps!

"One-year free access to all developers to Ola Maps on @Krutrim, more than Rs 100 crore in free credits,” Aggarwal announced on X on Monday.

“We’ve been using western apps to map India for too long and they don’t get our unique challenges: street names, urban changes, complex traffic, non-standard roads, etc.

"Ola Maps tackles these with AI-powered India-specific algorithms, real-time data from millions of vehicles, leveraging and contributing massively to open source (5 million+ edits just last year!),” he added.

In a company blog post, Ola said that in 2021, as the world began to emerge from the pandemic era, the firm planned to develop first-to-world features on customer and partner apps in Ola Mobility.

However, dependence on Western mapping providers, which did not prioritise India, hindered these plans.

“Our reliance on Western mapping providers, for whom India wasn't a priority, severely limited our ability to implement these features.

"To truly serve our users and push the boundaries of mobility, we needed a true alternative to global mapping giants — one better suited to the Indian market and more responsive to our unique needs.

"This realisation sparked the inception of Ola Maps,” said the blog post.

Challenge maze

Many streets and rural areas are either unmapped or poorly mapped, with street names often showing variations and inconsistencies.

Frequent changes to streets, potholes, and road quality issues further complicate mapping and impact travel time and safety.

Providing accurate, up-to-date maps can enhance navigation, travel planning, and user satisfaction.

Ola Maps aims to include features tailored to local needs, such as multi-language support, local business listings, and culturally relevant landmarks, while ensuring critical data-like location intelligence never leaves Indian soil.

Ola Maps is built to utilise a diverse set of data sources, sending updates in near real-time for the most accurate mapping data possible.

The firm’s AI-first data systems use real-time data from millions of vehicles using Ola Maps, a fleet of Ola S1 scooters with 360 cameras, open-source government data repositories, OpenStreetMap, partnerships, and proprietary sources.

These systems help build essential map features such as roads, points of interest, street furniture, building geometry, and traffic signals.

Over the past year, Ola has contributed 5.43 million edits to OpenStreetMap.

There is a highly sophisticated data platform in place which ingests more than 5 million messages per second from a multitude of sensors and telemetry sources.

Ola Maps is now live across the Ola ecosystem.

Tens of thousands of customers use Ola Maps daily on their scooters and the Ola Electric app for guided commutes within their cities.

The platform handles over a million search queries daily for Ola Electric users.