Launch HN: Voygr (YC W26) – A better maps API for agents and AI apps
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.
Discussion Highlights (20 comments)
il
I like the agent-first signup via API. Is this meant to be distributed as an agent skill?
macrolet
Who are your customers? Consumer or business?
acombandrew
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.
deepdarkforest
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.
amir_karbasi
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?
frankdenbow
Implementing maps into our app so giving this a shot. How does pricing compare to google maps api?
thesiti92
what kinds of data quality evals do you guys use now? i'm curious to try integrating it
dk8996
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.
bravura
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
maelito
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 ?
teepo
Why not go with V'ger? Seems like a missed opportunity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Trek_characters_(...
gnerd00
I 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.
Toby11
what does “exist” mean in this case.. what is factored to determine a place exist? the building is there? people are speaking about it on social media? they have ad on google that point to the local address etc?
tty456
> Their API can't tell you the chef left last month Your API can do that? Using what data?
jwelten
Interesting approach. The annual churn stat seems brutal, I imagine that gets worse in certain categories (restaurants, pop-ups, seasonal businesses). How do you handle conflicting signals? E.g., a business shows as open on Google, closed on Yelp, and the website returns a 404. Is there a confidence score in the API response or is it binary (exists/doesn't)
TurdF3rguson
I'm a little underwhelmed by the api, it tells me if the business exists and is open, which is a tiny subset of what google places can tell me.
k___c
Gemini now has grounding in Maps data. How will you differentiate?
mercurialsolo
This whole post sounds - LLM generated
clawbridge
Interesting, just the thought of building these tools for agents is a good move, keep collecting feedback and iterating, good luck!
sbinnee
I also have been brewing a similar idea only in my head. But mine is for the local Korean market. Google maps is simply not reliable. Korean people rely on Naver map or Kakao map, who do not even provide APIs. Users are locked up with these local services. They may launch their own mediocre AIs to help the search, who knows in a few years. But then it's going to be too late. I think they should just open up APIs and let developers explore. What is worse is a huge number of tourists should also use these local services whose translation is not in place. Soon enough, people will ask their AI assistants which restaurants to try out when they plan a visit to Korea. I can see that there is huge opportunity here. Kudos to Voygr team. Fingers crossed.