Bhavish Aggarwal, CEO and co-founder of Ola
Credit: Reuters File Photo
Ola Cabs, one of India's most famous ride-hailing services, will soon be moving on from Google Maps to their in-house Ola Maps, which will in turn save the company Rs 100 crores per year, as per a post on X by founder-CEO Bhavish Aggarwal.
In his social media post, Aggarwal said, "After 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 also listed the other features that will be coming to Ola soon, which include street view, NERFs, indoor images, 3D maps, drone maps, etc.
Ola, in 2021, had acquired GeoSpoc, a geospatial services provider, whose CEO and his team of researches also joined the ride-hailing app to work on improving and developing new technologies for the company.
Back then, Aggarwal, as per an Economic Times report, had said, “Multi-modal transportation options will need geospatial intelligence to understand the unique benefits of each option and provide suggestions accordingly."
Ola has been making in-house technology to try and become as self-sustaining as possible. Earlier this year, the company shifted from Microsoft Azure to its in-house Krutrim platform.
The shift was because of an issue Aggarwal had taken with Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, which had removed one of his posts in which the 38-year-old attacked LinkedIn for what he had termed their "pronoun illness".
"No corporate person should be able to decide what will be banned. Data should be owned by the creators instead of being owned by the corporates who make money using our data and then lecture us on 'community guidelines'," he had said.
Aggarwal further wrote, "Since LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft and Ola is a big customer of Azure, we've decided to move our entire workload out of Azure to our own Krutrim cloud."
Ola Electric is working on building solid-state batteries, Aggarwal had said in June.
With Reuters, PTI inputs