Grab Holdings Limited, the company behind the ride-hailing app, has announced the launch of GrabMaps, a new enterprise service that will allow the company to tap into the $1 billion market opportunity in Southeast Asia per year for mapping and location-based services.
First developed for in-house use, GrabMaps was created to address Grab’s need for a more hyperlocal solution to power its services. GrabMaps already provides location-based intelligence and services to all Grab verticals in 7 out of the 8 countries it operates in, which includes the Philippines.
Grab said expects to be fully self-sufficient with GrabMaps by the third quarter of this year.
Tan Hooi Ling, co-founder of Grab, said: “Grab has always sought to build innovative tech that addresses Southeast Asia’s hyperlocal needs and GrabMaps is a great example of that. 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.
“We’ve invested to turn this intelligence into a competitive advantage, allowing us to serve our users and partners with a great experience, at the same time driving efficiency and cost-savings for the business. We’re very proud that soon we will be fully self-powered by our own mapping and location-based technology. Commercializing this technology is another step forward for our young but fast-growing Enterprise and New Initiatives business.”
From driver/delivery-partner allocations, ETA calculations, route planning to delivery cost optimization and more, Grab said mapping technology and underlying points of interest (POI) and route intelligence are critical to the majority of core features that platforms like Grab rely on.
GrabMaps today powers more than 800 billion API calls per month across a variety of Grab services. Based on a benchmark study of GrabMaps’ performance versus a leading third-party mapping provider, GrabMaps had a 4x lower error rate and 10x lower latency, according to the company.
The company’s internal data also showed that for countries that have moved completely to GrabMaps, the ease of finding the right POI for transport bookings improved by 3 percentage points on average, while ETT accuracy improved by 1 percentage point regionally, with some countries seeing improvements of up to 7.8 percentage points.
The company said GrabMaps’ core advantage is that it is built on the principles of community-based mapping that leverages Grab’s consumers, merchants, and fleet of driver and delivery partners.
GrabMaps solutions draw from fresh data from millions of orders and rides served daily, with real-time feedback from partners on road closures, business address changes, the company said.
“Driver and delivery-partners also have the opportunity to contribute to our maps, collecting POIs and other rich data like street imagery, street names, traffic signs and more for additional income. This gives GrabMaps an edge in accuracy, coverage and freshness while being highly cost-effective,” it added.
