Use Ola Maps: Bhavish Aggarwal urges developers to exit Google maps

Bhavish Aggarwal, cofounder of ride-hailing company Ola, on Monday, announced a one-year free access to all developers to Ola Maps on artificial intelligence (AI)-driven Krutrim platform, along with more than Rs 100 crore in free credits.

After exiting Microsoft Azure Cloud, it is time for the developers to shun Google maps, Aggarwal said.

On July 6, Ola said it had exited Google maps and shifted to Ola Maps, developed in-house for its cab operations. The move has reportedly saved the company nearly Rs 100 crore a year.


“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,” Aggarwal said in a post on X.


He said that Ola Maps tackles these challenges with AI-powered India-specific algorithms, real-time data from millions of vehicles, leveraging and contributing massively to open source “with more than 5 million edits just last year” to the Open Street Maps.

“We’re outperforming competitors on location accuracy, search accuracy, search latency and ETA accuracy,” said the Ola founder.

In a separate blog post, the company said Ola Maps is built to utilise the most diverse set of data and send updates in near real-time to ensure as accurate mapping data as possible.

“Our AI-first data systems utilise real-time data from millions of vehicles using Ola Maps, a fleet of Ola S1s equipped with 360-degree cameras, open-source government data repositories, OpenStreetMap, partnerships and proprietary sources to build essential map features such as roads, points of interest, street furniture, building geometry and traffic signals,” the company explained.

Aggarwal had previously announced that his company had cut all its ties with Microsoft Azure and shifted his company's entire workload to the in-house AI platform Krutrim.