Grab Holdings Limited recently announced the launch of GrabMaps, a navigation service to Waze and Google Maps. It is currently available in 7 out of the 8 countries it operates in.
The company expects to move all its operations to GrabMaps by Q3 2022.
The back alleys and narrow side streets common across Southeast Asia cities often don’t show up on conventional maps but are navigated by our driver and delivery partners every day.
Commercialising this technology is another step forward for our young but fast-growing Enterprise and New Initiatives business.
Grab co-founder, Tan Hooi Ling.
GrabMaps powers more than 800 billion API calls per month across a variety of Grab services.
Like its contemporaries, GrabMaps’ data is crowdsourced. In this case, it mines data from anyone who uses it, like Grab’s own consumers, merchants, drivers, and delivery partners.
It also has real-time feedback features where users can mark road closures, update business addresses, and more.
Grab drivers, riders, and alike will be incentivised to contribute to GrabMaps by adding street imagery, street names, traffic signs, and more using Grab’s proprietary map-making camera, Kartacam, for additional income.
Grab also hopes to monetize GrabMaps by marketing it to any organisation that uses navigation services such as tech platforms, telcos, logistics companies, and government agencies.
It plans to release GrabMaps’ application programming interface (APIs)later this year and its mobile software development kits (SDKs) next year.
