Ola exits Google Maps, switches to in-house Ola Maps; move to save ₹100 crore a year

Ola Cabs, India's major cab aggregator, said it was parting ways with Google Maps as the company has fully integrated its ride-hailing platform with the natively developed Ola Maps.

The announcement was made by the company's co-founder and chairman Bhavish Aggarwal late on Friday. The switch, he claimed, would allow Ola Cabs to save up to ₹100 crore annually.

"After Azure exit last month, we’ve now fully exited Google Maps. We used to spend ₹100 crore a year but we’ve made that 0 this month by moving completely to our in house Ola Maps," Aggarwal posted on X (formerly Twitter).

Ola had confirmed its decision to snap ties with Microsoft's Azure in May, as it decided to shift its workload on the in-house artificial intelligence platform Krutrim.

"Any other developer who wants to move out of Azure, we will offer a full year of free cloud usage. As long as you don’t go back to Azure after that," Aggarwal had tweeted on May 11.

Ola Maps API available on Krutrim Cloud

Ola Maps API, which offers a suite of location services, is available on Krutim Cloud. These include various services as Navigation API, Places API, Tiles API, and Routing APIs. They are available on both iOS and Android platforms.

The API services "provide developers with powerful tools to integrate mapping and location-based services into their applications", Ola Maps states on its website.

Notably, Ola had taken over GeoSpoc, a Pune-based geospatial services provider, in October 2021. The company had, in January this year, unveiled plans to integrate the in-house map with the two-wheelers offered by its EV arm Ola Electric.