Startup Circle: How is Get My Parking modernizing parking service and infrastructure globally?

Get My Parking: Similar to any multi-story garage, an automated parking system helps to maximize the space for parking and minimize the use of land. The idea behind the minimum parking requirements is simple. As a greater number of people started owning cars, sufficient parking space near residential areas, office buildings, and other establishments were required for motorists to comfortably find a parking spot.

Today, there is a growing concern that parking lots have become overabundant and remain largely unused. In most big cities, the bulk of parking real estate remains vacant most of the time. Since we can't totally do away with parking, we need to identify the real problem. The real problem is inefficient and poorly managed parking systems. Thus, it is through a technological intervention that the parking problem can be solved. This is what Get My Parking does. Read ahead to know more about GMP as pictured by the CEO, Chirag Jain.

1. What is Get My Parking about?

The parking industry is a fragmented market with most of the technology being hardware-centric. We are a global leader providing an end-to-end Interoperable Smart Parking Platform that connects all parking and mobility stakeholders who were until now operating in silos. We digitise and upgrade the parking infrastructure using IOT software to become intelligent mobility hubs. And we do that in a SaaS business model with easy customisations to accelerate the adoption.

This helps parking operators, landlords, and smart city governments to quickly and effectively modernise their parking service without the need for replacing what they have. And then they can offer value-added services like EV charging, car servicing, washing, insurance, etc for user convenience. And integrate with new models of mobility like shared mobility, last-mile mobility, deliveries and logistics.

2. How did you come up with the idea?

Rasik Pansare and I, we founded Get My Parking (GMP) in 2015. I had worked in the automobile industry and came up with this concept. Rasik and I, we met and started working on this as an experiment. By July 2015, we were convinced enough with the early results to plunge into this business full time and started "Get My Parking" officially.

We faced several challenges in the early months. Yet, GMP could deploy over 100 Smart Parking systems and processed over 1 million tickets. GMP also powered the world's largest event parking, Maha Kumbh Mela in Ujjain in the first year. Over the years, GMP has processed over 50 million total transactions till now. Each year brings with it new learnings, new milestones, and new challenges. But the journey to digitise every parking globally has only just started.

3. What is your business/market growth?

The global parking industry market size was valued at USD 100 billion and is expected to witness significant growth over the next few years with the advent of connected vehicles and new modes of mobility and gig economy. Increased usage of vehicles for all forms of mobility and logistics, especially in urban centres, is driving the demand for a tech parking platform.

We are a product pioneer. Thus, our IoT Platform has grown exponentially in all terms. Our revenues have grown about 100x since the first year. On the other hand, the number of parking lots that we brought digital transformation counts over 2200 globally. We are today processing roughly 2 million parking transactions every month.

4. What cities are you in, presently?

In India, in terms of active deployments, we are in 11 cities including Delhi NCR, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Mumbai. In terms of static parking data, GMP is the largest aggregator and distributor of parking information, with comprehensive data of over 9000 parking lots of 50 cities in India. We have also done multiple governments and smart city projects.

Globally, GMP has over 2200 active smart parking deployments with work orders in 17 countries. Our single IoT platform has also launched 7 different white label parking apps around the world in different languages and markets.

5. Who are your consumers?

Our smart parking platform helps every stakeholder in the parking and mobility ecosystem. We sell our platform licenses to Parking Operators, Smart City / Governments, Corporates and Residential societies; as well as a host of mobility providers like Auto OEMs, mapping apps, shared mobility fleets, and logistics companies.

6. What are your Post-Covid plans?

Parking operators need to prepare themselves to offer a contactless parking experience to customers at various touchpoints – entry, exit, and payments among others. This would mean smart parking applications for a streamlined entry and exit of vehicles into a parking lot and most importantly, digital, cashless modes of payment as pulling up a ticket is something most customers would shy away from.

With the help of our smart parking’s contactless payment technology, parking businesses can offer their customers a safe and hassle-free parking experience for both on and off-street parking. This technology will also reduce queues and save time at the entry/exit points and ticket machines.

Any parking owner like municipal corporations, housing societies, corporate campuses and real estate owners can save thousands of dollars per entry lane. That is if they want to upgrade their access mechanism to go touchless. In post-COVID-19 times, we want to make sure that all public parking lots are touchless and cashless. Our IoT solution has made the transition seamless for the parking owners.

7. About the Funding

Jan 2016: Raised 2.50 crores from The Chennai Angels (TCA), an angel investing group.

Feb 2017: Raised $1.1 million (Rs 7.35 crores) in pre-Series A funding from IAN, venture firm Beenext, The Chennai Angels, And Hero Corporate Services chairman Sunil Munjal

Sept 2017: Raised $3 million (Rs 19.20 crore) in Series A funding from IAN Fund, BEENEXT, and Indian Angel Network.

The previous funding takes the company’s total fund count to nearly 29.05 Crores. We are currently raising funds to power our international sales growth and product development and already have few commitments.