Key takeaways
- Ola shifts from Google Maps to its own Ola Maps, investing INR 100 crore in credits.
- CEO Bhavish Aggarwal emphasizes AI-driven, India-specific mapping solutions to address local challenges.
- Ola Maps aims to support future mobility innovations, including autonomous vehicles and drones.
- The platform utilizes crowd-sourced geo-mapping and real-time data from millions of vehicles.
- Ola Maps has made over 5 million edits last year, contributing significantly to open-source mapping.
After announcing the huge exit from Google Maps and shifting completely to self-built Ola Maps, Bhavish Aggarwal, CEO of Ola, has announced that the company is giving one-year free access to Ola Maps on Krutrim Cloud, offering credits worth over INR 100 crore.
“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,” said Aggarwal, while also adding that Ola Maps tackles these with AI-powered India-specific algorithms, leveraging real-time data from millions of vehicles and contributes significantly to open-source platforms, with over 5 million edits last year.
Ola Maps is not just for current needs but aims to build the cartographic infrastructure for future mobility innovations, including autonomous vehicles and drones. This ambitious journey began three years ago to revolutionise mobility through comprehensive and dynamic mapping solutions.
The data ecosystem is founded on the concept of crowd-sourced geo-mapping, utilising the extensive user base of Ola Maps, OpenStreetMap, open-source government data repositories, and other proprietary sources.
The system gathers vast amounts of location information through anonymised GPS data, curated by AI models. Sensor data from two-wheelers, three-wheelers, and four-wheelers aids in identifying missing roads, real-time traffic congestion, road restrictions, and various other critical data points.
Upcoming features for Ola Maps include street view, neural radiance fields (NERFs), indoor images, 3D maps, and drone maps. Ola Maps API is now available on Krutrim Cloud, offering a suite of location services designed to support enterprises focusing on localised location services.
All of this is after Aggarwal announced the company’s exit from Microsoft Azure last month, to build its own cloud infrastructure. It has migrated its entire database from AWS and Microsoft Azure to the Krutrim AI Cloud. According to an estimate, Ola will save INR 15 crore by doing this.
