GrabMaps to power location-based services for AWS customers in Southeast Asia

PHOTO: Philipp Kandal, Chief Product Officer, Grab

Advertisement

Grab, Southeast Asia’s leading superapp, today announced GrabMaps has become a data provider for Amazon Location Service, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) location-based service that is designed to help developers easily and securely add maps, points of interest, geocoding, routing, tracking, and geofencing to their applications.  AWS customers, leveraging Amazon Location Service, now have access to high-quality regional mapping data that includes over 50 million addresses and points of interests (POIs) from GrabMaps spanning Singapore, Cambodia, Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Thailand. Customers can also leverage Grab’s hyperlocal search and routing functionality tailored to the region’s unique attributes, from its small alleyways and subdivisions to hard-to-find places. 

Many organizations from a wide range of industries including tech, logistics, telecommunications, and government agencies require location-based services for applications. With this collaboration, developers and teams using Amazon Location Service can enhance or build their own location-enabled applications using GrabMaps. AWS customers can display their desired data on local maps that are up-to-date, and use search boxes that accurately locate end-user addresses and POIs. Customers can also add route planning and optimization capabilities to their apps, drawing on GrabMaps’ up-to-date road network and traffic information. Users can calculate the fastest routes and provide accurate estimated arrival times, factoring in parameters such as modes of transport, real-time traffic conditions, departure timing and more, and with options to avoid tolls, ferry routes or highways. 

Philipp Kandal, Chief Product Officer, Grab, said, “GrabMaps offers a unique view of Southeast Asia, with data and functionality that is exceptional in freshness, coverage and accuracy. We are excited to collaborate with AWS’s world-class infrastructure to share our capabilities with other companies, and help them build services and applications that we hope will better serve Southeast Asians.”

Conor McNamara, Managing Director in ASEAN, AWS, said, “With the rapid rise of Southeast Asia’s digital economy, having access to accurate and cost-effective mapping data is critical to efficient operations especially in the e-commerce, transportation, and logistics sectors. The integration of GrabMaps into Amazon Location Service now provides hyper-localized and up-to-date mapping data across Southeast Asia for AWS customers and their end users.”

Operational and cost efficiencies brought about by GrabMaps’ core functionalities have already started to help businesses using Amazon Location Service maximise their platform’s capabilities. Luce SG is an on-demand home services platform based in Singapore that customers use to easily book the services they need for their home and office, from cleaning to air conditioner servicing.

Jason Zhang, Director at Luce SG, said, “As we expand into Indonesia and the

Philippines, it has been challenging for us to obtain reliable map and routing data in order for us to dispatch our service staff, especially given the large number of informal roads in this region. Amazon Location Service powered by GrabMaps has one of the most accurate maps and routing data in these geographies, helping our customers make their operations more efficient and improving the user experience. With Amazon Location Service and GrabMaps powering our dispatch and routing, we are confident that we can deliver the same on-time performance in all the regions we operate, including those outside of Singapore.”

Amazon Location Service is a location-based service that helps developers easily and securely add maps, points of interest, geocoding, routing, tracking, and geofencing to their applications without compromising on data quality, user privacy, or cost. 

An enterprise service that was first developed for in-house use, GrabMaps has now grown to power Grab’s services across the region. GrabMaps is built on the principles of community-based mapping, making the service highly cost-effective while offering high-quality mapping data. It leverages Grab’s extensive network of consumers, merchants, and driver and delivery partners, extracting and refreshing mapping data on a daily basis from millions of orders and rides, with real-time feedback from partners on road closures, business address changes and more. GrabMaps powers over 800 billion API calls per month across a variety of services encompassing places search, dispatch, ETA calculations, routing, navigation and more. It has helped add more than 800,000 kilometers of missing roads to the OpenStreetMap. 

To read more about GrabMaps, visit the link here.