Ride-hailing company Ola Cabs has fully transitioned to using its proprietary Ola Maps, as announced by co-founder Bhavish Aggarwal on Friday. Aggarwal mentioned on the micro blogging platform X that this shift has eliminated the previous annual expenditure of ₹100 crore on maps, encouraging users to update their Ola app to access the new maps.
Aggarwal highlighted that Ola Maps would soon feature additional functionalities such as street view, neural radiance fields (NERFs), indoor images, 3D maps, and drone maps. Moreover, APIs for Ola Maps will be available through cloud services provided by its sister company, Krutrim AI, which was also founded by Aggarwal. An API is a software interface that allows different computer programs to communicate with each other.
This transition to Ola Maps comes after Ola moved its IT workload from Microsoft’s Azure to Krutrim’s cloud, a shift that was reported by ET on May 11. Aggarwal explained that this decision was in response to LinkedIn removing a post where he had criticized the use of the pronoun ‘they,’ which violated LinkedIn’s community guidelines.
Krutrim AI recently launched its cloud infrastructure and services for businesses, including GPU-as-a-service for AI computing, which allows enterprises and developers to train and fine-tune models. On May 22, Aggarwal announced that Ola had completely moved its workload off Azure within a week. By May 30, ET reported that Ola was also moving its IT workload off Amazon Web Services (AWS).
For Azure, this departure translates to a daily revenue loss of Rs 5-25 lakh, and for AWS, it’s between Rs 30 lakh and Rs 40 lakh. However, these figures are unlikely to significantly impact Azure and AWS, which together hold a 40% share in India’s $8.3 billion public cloud market.
On June 28, Aggarwal revealed the pricing for Krutrim AI’s on-demand cloud GPUs, ranging from Rs 105 per hour to over Rs 1,160 per hour, depending on the GPU type.
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