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Ample parking day or night? Maybe in some quiet little mountain town, but down here in Denver parking can be a huge pain – and big business. Denver-based Parkifi is looking to use a whole lot of data to make parking a whole lot more efficient. A group of investors including Galvanize Ventures, Access Venture Partners and Foundry Group Angels are betting $2 million they’ll pull it off.
The Denver-based company makes software that allows users to view the availability of parking spaces in real time on their mobile app. The real genius behind Parkifi’s software, however, isn’t aimed at consumers, but at parking lot operators and cities that use the data in the aggregate.
“The idea behind Parkifi is simply to make parking less of a hassle, and to do that at a reasonable cost to operators,” said Ryan Sullivan, CEO and co-founder of Parkifi in a statement. “Drivers can find spots quicker and parking operators can optimize revenue by understanding how their lots are being used.”
The software works by placing a sensor in each parking space – be it on-street parking or garage parking – and then those sensors spit out real time data to the spot’s owners. The data can then be used by parking lot operators or cities to make efficiency improvements – which should mean more parking for you and more revenue for them.
The service is being rolled out in 7,000 parking spots run by a parking management company in Denver, and the first locations have begun to go live. In the near future the software will also be seen on the streets of Boulder and in parking lots in Pittsburgh.
The company was founded last year by Ryan Sullivan and Rishi Malik, two former SendGrid employees, and was launched following graduation from the Boomtown startup accelerator. Their recent influx of investment will be used to fund growth and further develop their Colorado-based team, and hopefully remove ‘circling the block’ from our idiomatic lexicon.
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