One of the country's leading cab aggregators, Ola, officially launched their new 'Ola Maps' today. The company decided to stop using Google Maps and introduced their proprietary Ola Maps instead. This announcement was made by Ola's founder, Bhavish Aggarwal, on the social networking platform 'X'. Ola has fully transitioned from Google Maps to their in-house Ola Maps navigation service.
In a social media post, Bhavish Aggarwal mentioned, "After exiting Azure last month, we have now completely transitioned away from Google Maps. We used to spend a billion rupees annually, but now that we have moved entirely to our in-house Ola Maps, that cost is reduced to zero! Check your Ola app and update it if necessary."
Aggarwal further added in another post, "For those curious about what we have built in Ola Maps and how we leveraged the open-source community, we will be publishing a detailed technical blog this weekend. Hope you all enjoy reading it!"
Ola Maps to Get Even Better:
The company is working on adding features such as street view, neural radiance fields (NERFs), indoor images, 3D maps, and drone maps to Ola Maps. They also revealed that Ola Maps will include application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by their partner firm Krutrim AI, which handles the cloud services. An API is a software interface that enables two or more computer programs or components to communicate with each other.
Recently, Ola shifted their IT workload from Microsoft's Azure to Krutrim's cloud infrastructure. Following this transition, Ola took the significant step of implementing their in-house Ola Maps in their cabs. Krutrim's cloud services offer GPU capabilities for AI computing, allowing enterprises and developers to train and improve their models. On May 22, Aggarwal posted that Ola had migrated its entire workload from Azure within a week.
