After exiting Microsoft’s Azure last month, Bhavish Aggarwal-led Ola Cabs has now decided to fully exit Google Maps on its ride-hailing platform. The company CEO says Ola Cabs will save around ₹100 crore by moving to its in-house Ola Maps.
"Azure exit last month, we’ve now fully exited Google Maps. We used to spend ₹100 cr a year but we’ve made that 0 this month by moving completely to our in-house Ola maps! Check your Ola app and update if needed," Aggarwal informed via X.
He adds that Ola maps API (Application Programming Interface) will also be available on the Krutrim cloud. Krutrim is Ola's AI company focused on building the complete AI computing stack. It has so far received the first round of funding worth $50 million at a valuation of $1 billion, led by Matrix Partners India and others. Its flagship product Krutrim is a family of large language models, including base and pro versions, which will have multimodal, larger knowledge capabilities.
"Many more features coming soon - street view, NERFs, indoor images, 3D maps, drone maps etc!" wrote Aggarwal.
The current development comes more than three years after Ola acquired a geospatial services company based in Pune called GeoSpoc. Bhavish says his team has built Ola Maps in-house. "For those curious to know what we have built in Ola maps in-house and what we have leveraged from the open source community, we will be publishing a detailed technical blog over the weekend."
Responding to his post, a user wrote with a handle, GowthamaSeenu, on X that the accuracy of the "Ola maps is getting better than even Google Maps". "Almost every day I am using #OlaMaps, day by day the accuracy, time prediction, turnings, loading speed everything is getting better even Google Maps doesn't have the traffic signal mark, kudos to Ola tech team," he wrote.
Bhavish has been quite vocal about the government's "Make in India" push and has used his social media reach to spread the message regarding the indigenisation of the latest technologies.
Three days back, he wrote on X that India needs to move beyond just being an "AI use-case of the world". "We need to grow beyond just being the AI “use case” capital of the world. We became the social media use case capital of the world with the highest number of users for global platforms. Everyone knows the strategic risk we have because of this and not having our own tech, platforms."
In May 2024, Aggarwal had slammed the Microsoft-led social media platform LinkedIn for removing his "pronoun illness" post from the social networking platform calling it "unsafe". He accused LinkedIn’s AI of "imposing a political ideology" on Indian users.
“Dear @LinkedIn this post of mine was about YOUR AI imposing a political ideology on Indian users that’s unsafe, sinister. Rich of you to call my post unsafe! This is exactly why we need to build own tech and AI in India. Else we’ll just be pawns in others political objectives,” Aggarwal said.
Consequently, Aggarwal said his company had decided to move its entire workload out of Microsoft-owned cloud service Azure to Krutrim cloud. "It is a challenge as all developers know, but my team is so charged up about doing this."
