Interview/ Rohan Verma, CEO, MapmyIndia
When Rohan Verma’s parents, Rashmi and Rakesh Verma, started CE Infosystems, a digital map database business, in 1995, the industry was non-existent. But they saw the potential of location component and invested their savings in the company. Rohan joined the business in 2004. MapmyIndia’s solutions are now used by the likes of BMW, Jaguar, Tata Motors and Amazon, and it works closely with ISRO. Rohan says mapping everything can lead to a lot more use cases. Excerpts from an interview.
Q/ How did you start on maps?
A/ My parents were inspired when they saw colour-coded maps at a trade show in the US showing the sales of a company across different states, business intelligence from the location dimension. They felt that unleashing the power of location and maps could yield benefits to everybody.
The first 10 years they developed maps in India purely for business because there was no GPS navigation available in the country then. I got involved 20 years ago. I was doing engineering at Stanford and I understood tech. I started doing my research, and realised in India there was no such mapping platform.
Q/ Didn’t Eicher do something in the 1990s?
A/ Eicher was a few years later, late 1990s, and that was print maps. The maps before that were from the British Raj era. So my father said, ‘If location is going to be the future and 80 per cent of all data will have a location component, then utilising that can unleash benefits for everybody. Why don’t we build the digital map data product for all of India? Be the first to do it! That’s an opportunity.’
Mapping 3.3 million square kilometres of India from scratch would be an extremely comprehensive exercise. They said they would make it their lives’ work. For the first 10 years, they were walking, driving, collecting data across millions of kilometres. And they found clients like Coca-Cola, Marico, Qualcomm and Indian Navy, solving enterprise problem with digital maps. Those customers would pay them, and they would deliver the solution, which would fund the product development of digital map data. So it was a customer-funded business model, not a venture capital funded business model.
Q/ You might have needed some big amount of funding.
A/ My parents had pretty successful careers in the US; they had savings from that. Another thing they did was, every time a customer paid up they reinvested that in building the digital map data.
Q/ And then you entered the picture.
A/ My involvement started with taking the digital map data from a desktop world, from a purely enterprise world, to democratising it through online. We built India’s first interactive mapping portal, an online mapping platform. Just for context, there were Yahoo Maps and MapQuest in the US, but India didn’t have any such thing. And Google Maps didn’t exist then.
Back in 2004, we were talking about online mapping APIs and internet mapping platforms. The journey from there started to expand the use cases for MapmyIndia. It started with making it available online so that any web site and any company could integrate it. Then we launched our own MapmyIndia navigator device. It was revolutionary at that time. And automotive OEMs said instead of consumers putting it on the dashboard, why don’t we integrate it inside the in-vehicle infotainment? We also had it as a separate product you could put on the dashboard. It was a very popular consumer gadget at the time.
And then, IoT happened―the other big use case of GPS beyond navigation to be able to remotely track your vehicles so that you can manage your fleet and make sure logistics is optimised. In 2011, we launched a SaaS platform and IoT devices around GPS tracking.
Q/ Tell me about your collaboration with ISRO.
A/ ISRO has been a mentor, inspiration and a godfather to MapmyIndia. We came together quite a few years ago to help India have its own end-to-end geospatial stack, from satellites to ground to downstream applications. We collaborate on multiple fronts. One of them is NavIC, India’s Global Navigation Satellite System. The other is ISRO’s Earth observation satellites.
Q/ For remote mapping?
A/ Yes, for remote sensing all sorts of satellite imagery and Earth observation data for many use cases―for agriculture, climate change, urban development, all of that gets collected by ISRO, and then MapmyIndia processes and publishes it.
Q/ Considering the two big global players on the scene (Google and Apple), how much can Indian companies manage to strike out their own path?
A/ MapmyIndia’s focus has historically been B2B and B2B2C, and there’s a very large addressable market. Just in the short term, there is about Rs8,700 crore worth of business to go after!
There’s also a B2C opportunity. MapmyIndia’s Maples app had more than 20 million downloads in 2022. Of course, the challenge is if the incumbent comes preloaded. Everybody is hoping that Indian consumers will get more choice and competition will thrive.
Q/ Is that why so many people are suddenly interested in maps?
A/ It is a great opportunity. We have made true a number of use cases where maps can be useful. That has opened up many addressable markets. Customers across industries and verticals are enjoying the benefits of maps and discovering how maps can be even more useful and valuable to them, for their work or personal lives. So clearly, maps have a bright future.
Q/ What are the future growth areas?
A/ Mapping everything can lead to many use cases in the world of mobility. It’s called N-CASE―navigation led, connected, autonomous, shared, and electric platforms. And we have many solutions under the banner of Maples Auto. It is based on things like geospatial analytics or visualisation.
Q/ Do you foresee more competition?
A/ There’s going to be competition. But I don’t think the competition realises that it is hard to build a very good product and keep it updated. And it is harder to build a map business. Globally, there are very few companies that have been able to do it. And, in India, we have been doing it for 30 years and we are only innovating faster.
Q/ Does MapmyIndia have visions of becoming MapmyWorld?
A/ We are going international in a calibrated way, where we are choosing countries or regions where certain sets of our products can really benefit those countries. And you’ll start seeing this kind of international expansion in the next one year, even sooner.