Waze

Waze was founded in Israel in 2008. The company is headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel. In 2013, Google acquired Waze for approximately $1.1 billion, making it a wholly owned subsidiary of Google (now a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.). Waze is a free, community-driven GPS navigation app for smartphones that provides real-time traffic, road hazard, and police location data sourced from its user community.

The primary product is the Waze navigation app, available on iOS and Android. The app solves the problem of real-time routing by aggregating crowdsourced reports from drivers — traffic jams, accidents, road closures, speed cameras, and hazards — and using that data to calculate faster routes dynamically. The user base is global, with particularly strong penetration in Israel, Brazil, and the United States. The app is free to end users and is funded through in-app advertising (Waze Ads), which targets drivers based on location and route. Waze also operates Waze Carpool, a separate ride-sharing product focused on commuter carpooling.

The flagship product is the Waze navigation app, which operates on a crowdsourced data model distinguishing it from purely map-data-driven navigation apps. Waze Carpool (launched in 2016 as a pilot in Israel) is a separate app enabling drivers to offer rides to commuters traveling similar routes, with compensation capped near cost-of-fuel to avoid classification as a commercial transport service. The Waze for Cities (formerly Waze Connected Citizens Program) initiative provides municipalities and transportation authorities with anonymized traffic data in exchange for government road closure and hazard data feeds.

Waze competes directly with Google Maps and Apple Maps in turn-by-turn navigation. The crowdsourcing model — real-time, user-reported hazards and police locations — remains the product's most distinctive feature relative to competitors. Since the 2013 Google acquisition, Waze has operated as a standalone brand rather than being folded into Google Maps, though the two products share some underlying mapping data.

Waze maintains its R&D center and primary offices in Tel Aviv. The founding team and core engineering organization are Israeli, and the product was originally built in Israel. The Israel office houses the principal engineering, product, and data science functions. Waze is widely cited as one of the prominent examples of an Israeli consumer technology exit.