Waze
GPS navigation mobile app
Waze Mobile Ltd, (; Hebrew: ווייז מובייל בע״מ) doing business as Waze (ווייז), formerly FreeMap Israel, is a subsidiary company of Google that provides satellite navigation software on smartphones and other computers that support the Global Positioning System (GPS). In addition to turn-by-turn navigation, it incorporates user-submitted travel times and route details while downloading location-dependent information over a cellular network. Waze describes its application as a community-driven initiative that is free to download and use.
The software was originally developed in Israel by Waze Mobile, a company founded by Israeli entrepreneurs Ehud Shabtai, Amir Shinar, and Uri Levine, who are also veterans of Unit 8200. Funding for the initial project was provided by two Israeli venture capital firms, Magma and Vertex Ventures Israel, as well as by an early-stage American venture capital firm, Bluerun Ventures. In June 2013, Waze Mobile was acquired by Google for US$1.3 billion.
The application generates revenue through hyperlocal advertising to an estimated 130 million users.
History
Development
In 2006, Israeli programmer Ehud Shabtai founded a community project known as FreeMap Israel, which aimed to create (with the crowd-sourcing assistance of community users) a free digital mapping database of Israel compiled in the Hebrew language with ensured free content, updates, and distribution. In 2008, Shabtai formed a company called Waze to commercialize the initial project; in 2009, it was renamed to Waze Mobile Ltd. and gave birth to its tagline "Outsmarting Traffic, Together." coined by the company's first in-house communications hire, Michal Habdank-Kolaczkowski.
“Waze” enters the record as gPS navigation mobile app. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Waze, navigation and mobile can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q942327. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2013, 2006, 2008 and 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “Waze” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.