'MAPPING OUR ROADS AND CULTURAL HERITAGE'

MapMyIndia is a deep tech company, which with its state-of-the-art mapping, navigation, geospatial analytics and IOT, is one of India's leading companies working towards an Aatmanirbhar Bharat. Organiser representative Deepti J Verma talked to Rohan Verma, CEO of MapMyIndia, about what it takes to navigate the start-up ecosystem and its breakthrough from 15 years of Digital Colonisation. Excerpts:

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Tell us how your parents started the company and when did you decide to join it ? 

MapMyIndia was started in 1995 by my parents. They are IIT Roorkee and BITS Pilani graduates. They believed that someday 80 per cent of all Indian data will have a location component to it, and digital maps will play an important role in our lives – whether individuals, businesses, Government or society. At that time, there were no digital maps available in India. Now people call them visionaries but at that time they were defamed, made fun of and called ‘crazy’. In that interregnum, they went walking, running and driving through millions of miles across the country, collecting and assembling data and saving it digitally. Since then, it's been their conviction, and mine too, that there are infinite utilities and cases of maps – whether it's food delivery, e-commerce, Government infrastructure planning or just our daily

From coming close to selling the company at one point to getting it listed in 2021 and then having been accredited and declared as an Indian Unicorn, it has been quite a leap forward. What happened in your favour in this interregnum?