| ▲ | Launch HN: Voygr (YC W26) – A better maps API for agents and AI apps | |||||||
| 37 points by ymarkov 3 hours ago | 18 comments | ||||||||
Hi HN, we’re Yarik and Vlad from VOYGR (https://voygr.tech/), working on better real-world place intelligence for app developers and agents. Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNIpcWIE0n4. Google Maps can tell you a restaurant is "4.2 stars, open till 10." Their API can't tell you the chef left last month, wait times doubled, and locals moved on. Maps APIs today just give you a fixed snapshot. We're building an infinite, queryable place profile that combines accurate place data with fresh web context like news, articles, and events. Vlad worked on the Google Maps APIs as well as in ridesharing and travel. Yarik led ML/Search infrastructure at Apple, Google, and Meta powering products used by hundreds of millions of users daily. We realized nobody was treating place data freshness as infrastructure, so we're building it. We started with one of the hardest parts - knowing whether a place is even real. Our Business Validation API (https://github.com/voygr-tech/dev-tools) tells you whether a business is actually operating, closed, rebranded, or invalid. We aggregate multiple data sources, detect conflicting signals, and return a structured verdict. Think of it as continuous integration, but for the physical world. The problem: ~40% of Google searches and up to 20% of LLM prompts involve local context. 25-30% of places churn every year. The world doesn't emit structured "I closed" events - you have to actively detect it. As agents start searching, booking, and shopping in the real world, this problem gets 10x bigger - and nobody's building the infrastructure for it. We recently benchmarked how well LLMs handle local place queries (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47366423) - the results were bad: even the best gets 1 in 12 local queries wrong We're processing tens of thousands of places per day for enterprise customers, including leading mapping and tech companies. Today we're opening API access to the developer community. Please find details here: https://github.com/voygr-tech/dev-tools We'd love honest feedback - whether it's about the problem, our approach, or where you think we're wrong. If you're dealing with stale place data in your own products, we'd especially love to hear what breaks. We're here all day, AMA. | ||||||||
| ▲ | maelito 22 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||
I'm not sure I understand : how can you product help for opening times or pictures of my local boulangerie ? What kind of data sources will help you automate the reviewing of its attributes ? | ||||||||
| ▲ | bravura an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||
Bog-standard LLM mapping is terrible and I recently added Google Maps to my personal agent to remediate this. I'd love to try Voygr for fun. Is there a skill defined that I could just swap in Voygr | ||||||||
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| ▲ | acombandrew 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||
This is a great idea, albeit one that will be really hard to pull off well but really valuable for developers if you're able to execute. Definitely kind of a boil-the-ocean high-schlep startup but I would love to see this succeed. | ||||||||
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| ▲ | amir_karbasi 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||
Really cool! We're currently using map and web searches in our agent to gather this info for our tool. Does it support an approximate address? For example, if a plaza can have multiple street numbers, do I need to make a request for each possible address or would it find a certain business with an approximate address? | ||||||||
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| ▲ | il 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||
I like the agent-first signup via API. Is this meant to be distributed as an agent skill? | ||||||||
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| ▲ | frankdenbow 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||
Implementing maps into our app so giving this a shot. How does pricing compare to google maps api? | ||||||||
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| ▲ | thesiti92 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||
what kinds of data quality evals do you guys use now? i'm curious to try integrating it | ||||||||
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| ▲ | macrolet 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||
Who are your customers? Consumer or business? | ||||||||
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| ▲ | deepdarkforest 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||
Its quite funny that you are building an "infinite place profile", you both worked on products used by 100s of millions of people, and yet your website is down from 45 minutes of HN traffic! Joking, but its a very good idea. Synchronization between the physical world information and digital has been a very hard problem for decades and im sure an agentic approach can 10x the value. | ||||||||
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| ▲ | dk8996 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||
We work in this space and have found that, very often, the realities on the ground do not match the digital information, especially when it comes to geospatial data, where businesses exist, what businesses actually exist, and their status. At Rwazi, we have millions of users helping collect on-the-ground data. | ||||||||