Bhavish Aggarwal-led ride-hailing firm Ola Cabs has transitioned to using its in-house online maps called Ola Maps, said the founder. “We used to spend ₹100 crore a year but we’ve made that zero this month by moving completely to our in house Ola maps! Check your Ola app and update if needed,” Aggarwal wrote in a post on microblogging platform X.
The Bengaluru-based company has been adding features such as street view, neural radiance fields (NERFs), indoor images, 3D maps and drone maps to Ola Maps, said Aggarwal. Cloud services provided by Krutrim AI will also have application programming interface (APIs) for Ola Maps, he added.
The move to shift to the in-house navigation platform comes six months after Ola Electric commercially launched Ola Maps in January this year. T the move to Krutrim AI, founded by Aggarwal, comes after it opened up its cloud infrastructure and cloud services for business.
Spat with Microsoft
The decision comes at a time when the company had moved its entire workload out of Azure. In May, the Ola Cabs founder had said that the shift was in response to Microsoft-owned LinkedIn pulling down his post that termed the usage of the pronoun ‘they’ as an “illness”.
The shift to an in-house platform will help Ola trim losses and help its further scale up Ola Maps. Ola parent ANI Technologies reported a consolidated net loss of ₹772.2 crore in the financial year 2022-23 (FY23), down nearly half from ₹1,522.3 crore in the previous fiscal year. Meanwhile, operating revenue rose 42 per cent year-on-year to ₹2,799.3 crore.
Ola Electric, the electric vehicle venture of Aggarwal, received Securities and Exchange Board of India’s (SEBI) approval for a public listing that will comprise a fresh issuance of shares worth ₹5,500 crore and an offer for sale (OFS) component of up to 9.51 crore shares.
