SUMMARY
Get My parking Will Use The Series A Funds To Upgrade Its IoT Platform
Cloud-based mobile parking startup Get My Parking has secured Series A funding of $3 Mn. The investment in Delhi and Bengaluru headquartered startup was led by IAN Fund, BEENEXT and Indian Angel Network.
The Series A funding will be utilised by Get My Parking to advance their product transformation and business impact.
Earlier this year, in February 2017, Get My Parking secured $1.1 Mn (INR 7.35 Cr) Pre Series A funding round. Prior to that, in January 2016, it had raised an angel funding round of $376K (INR 2.5 Cr) from The Chennai Angels (TCA).
Saurabh Srivastava, co-founder of IAN & Architect and Mentor of IAN Fund, said, “A truly ‘Made in India’ company, Get My Parking is set to revolutionise an untouched part of urban mobility – parking. With several smart city projects on board, Get My Parking is perfectly poised to leverage this huge opportunity with their sharp focus on execution.”
Get My Parking: The Mobile Parking Solution Banking On IoT
Founded in 2015 by IIT Madras alumni Chirag Jain and Rasik Pansare, alumni of FMS Delhi, Get My Parking provides IoT-based mobile parking platform which digitises any type of parking space. Its mobile parking app gives a bird’s eye view of all the legal parking lots and helps users to search, book and navigate to relevant parking across the city.
As claimed by the company in an official statement, Get My Parking can connect and digitise any type of unorganised parking to make it go online and consumer facing, all within 10 minutes.
As Chirag explained, “Existing parking experience tends to take a big chunk of time and fuel; this is where Get My Parking delivers a hassle-free parking experience to every automobile owner. Our dedicated team works towards digitisation, integration, and automation of the parking industry while simultaneously catering to the global mobility trends.”
With this data-centric approach, the startup claims to give users insights into the urban transport landscape which can be further utilised in making an improved urban infrastructure policy for smart cities. “In lieu of smart urban mobility, this new fundraise would be utilised towards upgrading their IoT platform to serve a wider range of stakeholders in the parking ecosystem,” added Chirag.
From Angel Round To Series A Funding: A Glimpse On The Milestones Achieved So Far
Get My Parking has so far partnered with industry leaders like Cisco, Intel, IBM, Sterlite, EY, Ericsson etc.
Apart from cashless parking management system and mobile application, Get My Parking provides city dashboards and enforcement applications for government authorities, revenue analytics for contractors, APIs for mobility providers and hardware integrations with OEMs.
But for these to be effective, different stakeholders need to be brought together. So, Get My Parking has built a completely integrated IoT platform that connects all these solutions and their stakeholders seamlessly with its mobile parking solution.
Their mobile parking platform benefits both ways by offering a piece for everyone’s requirement. Having successfully deployed their technology across 300 locations in Delhi, with a team size of 60, Get My Parking currently processes 1.7 Mn tickets per month.
“The Get My parking technology platform crossing 20 Mn transactions in 20 months exhibits the biology of scale and relevance. Having established its dominant role in its home market the company is at an exciting stage of making itself relevant globally in mature developed markets and as stakeholders we are delighted”, said Sudhir Rao, an existing investor and board director of Get My Parking.
Last year, its smart solution was appreciated by Narendra Modi during the Maha Kumbh Mela in Ujjain, where it digitised 400 hectares of parking with a capacity of 200K vehicles. Also, its solutions officially powered event parking during IPL 2016, Krishna Pushkaralu, Lucknow Mahotsav and Hyderabad Numaish. Get My Parking has also been awarded the ‘Travel app of the year- Emerging’ at the reputed AWS Mobility Awards 2017, hence cementing their industry leader position.
Get My Parking: The Road Ahead
Initially, it was perceived that their products are best suited only for developing countries but surprisingly, they saw huge interest coming from the developed countries as well. This is because their platform can easily bridge disconnected parking lots to digital mobility solutions at the fraction of other alternatives’ price and time.
“We are excited about how cities are changing in the future. Parking plays a crucial role here and we couldn’t find a better team globally than the folks at Get My parking,” said Dirk Van Quaquebeke, Managing Partner, BEENEXT.
Get My Parking is now poised for international growth with contractual partners in 15 countries to cater to the needs of global parking solution. They recently put their foot in Taiwan where a pilot of their technology with on-street sensors is taking place.
Another mobile parking solution which recently gained attention was PParkE, which raised a Seed funding round in January this year. The other startups listed in the brigade include ParkingWale, ParkingRhino, Secure Parking, ValetEZ and more. Last year in July 2016, news also surfaced that Thane Municipal Corporation (TMC) in Mumbai is planning to start a service through which motorists will be able to identify vacant spots on their mobile.
Get My Parking, on base of its IoT enabled and data centric mobile parking solution has been able to convince investors to raise its funding slab till Series A. However, the startup still has to face challenges such as low internet penetration, lack of proper urban infrastructure and reduced parking lots due to continuous depletion of available free space specifically in a country like India. How well the startup can cope up with these challenges in coming future, will be worth watching.
