 "Amit Lakhotia")
India has close to 50 million cars registered, with 70 per cent of them concentrated in the top 15 cities. The parking infrastructure in these places is often not laid out well enough to deal with such high density.
While civic authorities have taken to revamping parking spaces to be more efficient, infrastructure alone may not be enough. Tech solutions are necessary, and a Delhi-based startup is leading the charge.
Enter Park+, a startup on a mission to solve parking woes in dense cities. There are many facets to Park+ -- for most people it is an app for parking spots discovery, booking and payments, while others know it as the firm behind automated entry-exits gates at apartments and malls. It also retails FASTags, now mandatory for toll payment.
Park+ is the first parking-tech startup in India. It was launched in June 2019, and raised $11 million in series A from Matrix and Sequoia in January 2020.
“Amit’s experience building leading internet companies is unique and enables his big vision to make Park+ a company that makes everyday car ownership delightful. Indian car owners face pain points everyday such as finding parking to paying tolls, to accessing residential societies and Park+ has built tech solutions to give users a frictionless experience,” said Rajinder Balaraman, Director at Matrix India, in an emailed statement.
The multi-services approach is because parking cannot be solved in isolation, but in tandem with other problems car owners face. The rest is the vision of its founder, Amit Lakhotia, whose long-term play is to make Park+ the de-facto platform for all car-related services with parking as only an entry point.
“I was fortunate to have hands-on roles at my previous companies – Paytm and MakeMyTrip – where I got to design, strategize, launch and scale consumer products,” said Lakhotia, a alumnus of Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology and IIM-A. His stint from 2007-11 at MakeMyTrip was the early days of online travel booking in India, while at Paytm, Lakhotia was a key leader for the payment strategy.
The experience shows in the approach used by Park+ to scale. Let’s take the example of Park+ automated gates at residential complexes. When a user drives through, an alert is sent to the Park+ app (for security reasons). But most people don’t have Park+ app, but most likely have MyGate. Park+ has integrated its tech with MyGate for notifications to show up in the latter app.
Similarly, Park+ has signed up with CarDekho for a feature to show users the resale value of their vehicle, and one with Acko for insurance offers. There are also partnerships at work for ‘car breakdown’ assistance natively on Park+ app.
From a company point of view, Park+ has two business segments: parking booking and access control (automated gates). Lakhotia said, as of date, 75,000 parking spots (at public places mostly) are listed on the platform, and 2,500 are booked each day. Likewise, 1,000 residential apartments, 200 corporate buildings, 25 malls and a few hospitals use its access control solution across NCR, Mumbai and Bengaluru.
“We are also in active discussions with the government of Nagpur and Bengaluru, and the BMC in Mumbai for our offerings,” said Lakhotia.
For Lakhotia, this isn’t only what he set out to solve. His idea is to make better utilization of the parking spaces – which are limited.
“I don’t have my car parked at my spot next to my home in a private colony during the day time. What if someone can use it when I am not using it, and maybe, pay me for it,” said Lakhotia.
The other nuisance is people parking randomly on the road and blocking passage-way or somebody else’s car. Maybe someday, the QR-code stickers that are assigned to cars can be used to get in touch with car owners, said Lakhotia.
