Ola Cabs Ditches Google Maps for Ola Maps

Bhavish Aggarwal, founder and CEO of Ola Cabs, has announced that the ride-hailing company has fully transitioned from using Google Maps to its own proprietary navigation system, Ola Maps. This move, effective from July 5, will save the company INR 100 crore annually in fees previously paid to Google.
Aggarwal also teased upcoming features for Ola Maps, including street view, indoor images, 3D maps, drone maps, and neural radiance fields (NeRFs). Additionally, Ola Maps’ APIs will be integrated with Krutrim, Ola’s AI cloud platform.
The decision follows Ola Electric’s launch of Ola Maps in January with the Move OS 4 platform for electric two-wheelers. The company has been developing this navigation system for over a year. The switch to Ola Maps also comes after Aggarwal’s contentious LinkedIn post in May and the recent shift of Ola’s IT workload from Microsoft’s Azure cloud to Krutrim’s cloud.