Pretty much in sync with the developments taking place at its US rival Uber, Ola is today announcing a strategic investment into a section of mapping data from MapMyIndia. The cab-hailing upstart announced its partnership with MapMyIndia by acquiring a multi-year license.
Through this partnership, Ola will get complete access to mapping data from MapmyIndia, which has the IP ownership for the most comprehensive, accurate and updated digital map data for the country. With this first of its kind partnership in the country, Ola is looking to enable consistent map updates from MapmyIndia to Ola, making the data rich and relevant.
Ola mines billions of location data points from ride requests and fulfilment on its platform every day,enabling product innovations like real-time location updates atop the mapping data that it has now acquired. Ola also plans to build smarter routing algorithms that will result in improved efficiency for driver-partners and significantly lower ETAs for customers in the time to come.
Ankit Bhati, Co-founder & CTO at Ola says,
We are excited about this partnership with MapMyIndia, which brings onboard a wealth of mapping information like no other in the country, as we continue to build a world class product experience for users in the time to come.
The development is interesting. Uber, Ola’s fiercest rival from the U.S. had announced earlier in June, that it will be buying a part of Bing’s Mapping assets, which would include taking up off approximately 100 Microsoft employees as well.
Under the deal, Microsoft will also be sharing a part of its operating expenses with the cab-haling startup. However, what is even more important is the fact that Microsoft will be sharing Bing’s Mapping tech with Uber.
