Launch HN: Voygr (YC W26) – A better maps API for agents and AI apps
50 points by ymarkov 5 hours ago | 26 comments
- acombandrew 4 hours agoThis 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.
[-]- ymarkov 4 hours agoThanks, it is going to be fun! :)
- bravura 2 hours agoBog-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
[-]- ymarkov 2 hours agoGoogle also doesn't tell you if a place exists - it just returns the list of possible places which it thinks could be relevant. We have instructions defined for agents to onboard https://github.com/voygr-tech/dev-tools
- gnerd00 5 minutes agoI think you should market specifically to people and orgs that already have registered identity and location tracking of their movements, purchases and personal actions while on duty. Then you can practice your ambitious tech, but also not pull innocent people into more detailed tracking and analytics. Many occupations and orgs have already made this bargain, so stick with them instead of trying to get naive people to have their detailed movements and actions tracked. Also probably large parts of East Asia are doing this.
- maelito 2 hours agoI'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 ?[-]
- ymarkov 2 hours agoWe are not providing opening times yet - we just check if place is permanently closed or not. But it is in the works under our experimental enrichment API (which is not yet open to public)[-]
- wipfli 52 minutes agoI started scraping restaurant websites in Zürich and extracted and hand-checked opening hours in the OpenStreetMap format. The goal is to build a corpus for evaluation purposes which maps website texts to correct opening hours strings for all restaurants in Switzerland. Maybe you can use that to benchmark your own hours extracting system... https://github.com/wipfli/opening-hours/[-]
- ymarkov 32 minutes agoAppreciate sharing this project - democratizing this data is indeed a very important step. Interesting that you settled on Haiku - did you have a chance to check flash-2.5-lite or gpt-5-nano performance?
- amir_karbasi 4 hours agoReally 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?[-]
- ymarkov 4 hours agoThanks! Our initial API works as follows - you provide POI/business name and its address and we are telling you if it exists or not. So if you are looking to check if the plaza is existing, you just need to provide its supposed address. If it is a business within plaza, then an address of that business is required[-]
- amir_karbasi 3 hours agoLet me rephrase my question. How exact must the address input be? Do I need to include unit numbers? What if the street number is off by a few due to the layout of a plaza?
Using Maps or Web Search APIs, I can find approximate locations for certain businesses based on my input. Can your API work in a similar manner?
[-]- ymarkov 1 hour agoIt is supposed to work if you even don't include unit number or a house number is a bit off. We analyze other signals too, so if the address is a bit off, the API is still supposed to mark a place as existing
- frankdenbow 4 hours agoImplementing maps into our app so giving this a shot. How does pricing compare to google maps api?[-]
- ymarkov 4 hours agoIt is on par with Google Maps API, but Google gives you more data. Our terms of service are more flexible - for instance we don't require attribution and deleting our data past 30 days. And we are actively working on adding more info to our APIs
- teepo 2 hours agoWhy not go with V'ger? Seems like a missed opportunity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Trek_characters_(...[-]
- ymarkov 1 hour agoIndeed, we've been told about that. Hopefully, it won't be a defining moment for us as a company :)
- thesiti92 4 hours agowhat kinds of data quality evals do you guys use now? i'm curious to try integrating it[-]
- ymarkov 3 hours agoWe are using judges with LLMs and web grounding plus manual grading. We recently did a benchmark on the LLM quality across major AI providers - we plan to open source it soon and will probably open source our API quality check benchmark too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47366423
- deepdarkforest 4 hours agoIts 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.
[-]- ymarkov 4 hours agoThanks! Was it truly down? I have checked and I don't see any disruptions
- takahitoyoneda 2 hours ago[flagged]
- agent5ravi 4 hours ago[dead]
- dk8996 3 hours agoWe 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.
- aplomb1026 4 hours ago[dead]
- bhekanik 4 hours ago[dead]
- useftmly 2 hours ago[dead]
- Kachilu 3 hours ago[flagged]