Ola Cabs Saves Rs 100 Crore After Switching From Google Maps To Ola Maps

Three months after Ola Group completed its full transition of operations to Krutrim, its proprietary AI company, the company ended its partnership with Microsoft’s Azure

Ola Cabs, the ride-hailing company, has shifted from relying on Google Maps to its proprietary Ola Maps, achieving significant annual savings of approximately Rs 100 crore. Bhavish Aggarwal, CEO of Ola Cabs, noted that this change came after the company's recent transition away from Azure.

Aggarwal wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter), “After Azure’s exit last month, we’ve fully exited Google Maps. We used to spend Rs 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.”

He also mentioned that Ola Cabs will introduce several new features in the upcoming months, such as street view, neural radiance fields (NERFs), indoor images, 3D maps, and drone maps, among several others. Three months after Ola Group completed its full transition of operations to Krutrim, its proprietary AI company, the company ended its partnership with Microsoft’s Azure.

In May, Aggarwal announced on X that Ola would sever its Azure connections and transition all operations to Krutrim within a week. Alongside the launch of Krutrim AI, the company also unveiled plans for Cloud services and mapping solutions.

In October 2021, Ola acquired GeoSpoc, a Pune-based company specialising in geospatial services. Ola Maps now caters to the mapping needs of its core ride-hailing application. Furthermore, the company disclosed its intention to integrate Ola Maps into its electric two-wheelers via a software update in January.

Meanwhile, Ola Electric is in the initial phases of researching solid-state batteries for its electric scooters. Aggarwal mentioned that the company plans to incorporate these advanced batteries into the scooters by the following year. “We are in very early stages of our experimentation on solid state batteries,” Aggarwal had said.

Ola anticipates that these batteries, manufactured at its newly established gigafactory in Tamil Nadu, will serve as the power source for its widely used scooters, which aligns with the Indian government's incentives for battery manufacturing.