Grab, the largest delivery organization in Southeast Asia, is venturing into diversifying its portfolio with GrabMaps, a new subsidiary that creates up-to-date mapping data in those countries for their own use, and others.
GrabMaps extracts data on a daily basis from millions of orders and rides, with real-time feedback from partners on traffic, road closures, business address changes and more. This allows GrabMaps to remain highly cost-effective while offering the best quality regional mapping data in accuracy, coverage, and freshness.
Today, GrabMaps supports eight Southeast Asian countries: Singapore, Cambodia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar, and Thailand. The maps of the eight countries offer routing for cars and motorcycles.
AWS has added GrabMaps as an option to the Amazon Location Service that allows developers to add geospatial data and location functionality to applications.
“Amazon Location Service adds a new data source in Southeast Asia, GrabMaps, offering maps, search, and routing,” said AWS. “Developers building applications in Southeast Asia can display their data on local up-to-date maps, use search boxes to locate end-user addresses and points of interest, and calculate routes using real-time traffic conditions.”
Grab credits the success of its food and grocery delivery services to its documentation of the last mile of a journey. Grab announced last June that it would share its mapping efforts with others – for a fee of course.
Before the deal with AWS was revealed, the company said it would license map data with places, roads, traffic and imagery, and offer a suite of AI-powered map making services described as an “end-to-end stack that enterprise companies can leverage to build their own apps.” Grab said by 2023 APIs and mobile software development kits (SDKs) would be available for developers.
