Ola Cabs to now use Ola Maps instead of Google Maps, founder Bhavish Aggarwal says

Ola Cabs will be using its own in-house Ola Maps instead of Google maps, Ola founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal announced in a post on X (Formerly Twitter), adding that the company would save ₹100 crore in the process.

“We used to spend ₹100 cr a year but we’ve made that 0 this month by moving completely to our in house Ola maps!” he wrote.

He said Ola Maps will get many new features soon, such as street view, NERFs, indoor images, 3D maps, and drone maps, and that it would be available on Krutrim cloud.

What is Ola’s Krutrim AI and Krutrim cloud?

Krutrim, Ola’s AI company, is now a startup unicorn that was established in December last year. It launched its cloud services called Krutrim cloud just in May this year, and had 2,500 developers already sign up to use its services.

What happened before Ola stopped using Google Maps?

Ola’s decision to exit Google Maps comes after the company departed from using Microsoft’s cloud service, Azure last month, and shifted to using its own in-house cloud storage called Krutrim cloud, after Microsoft-owned LinkedIn removed his post on what he felt about the usage of pronouns.

Ola had been using Microsoft’s Azure for seven years, since 2017.

Vertical integration is when a company controls its own supply chain, rather than depending on external or third-party suppliers.

With these two moves, Ola has been seemingly pushing to become more independent as a company, reducing its dependency on suppliers. Apart from this, the company also is investing into research on solid-state batteries for its electric scooters, planning to use them by next year.