Park +: Discover and book parking with this app

Amit Lakhotia, CEO & Founder, Park+

By Srinath Srinivasan

With ever-increasing traffic comes the problem of parking. In metros, this has kept many owners from taking their vehicles out or suffer every day during rush hours. In other words, this becomes a business opportunity that can be done at scale using technology.

Delhi-based Park + aims to use deep tech to ease parking. “Today, there are many parking spots across several cities. These places are hard to find. We partner with the owners of the space and enable our users to discover and book them in advance,” says Amit Lakhotia, founder and CEO, Park+. “The spots have human supervision and the owners can safely use the spots for the duration they have booked. These spots are usually 10 minutes away from where they want to go,” he adds.

Park + has been aggressively aggregating parking spaces in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore and has around 75,000 spots for cars and two-wheelers. “Another use case we have is access control. We have Park+ tags for our customers. If they wish to utilise parking spots in corporate buildings or residential societies, they can simply scan the tags and go to their designated spot,” shares Lakhotia. The proprietary algorithm manages parking spots across different areas and also helps in managing user bookings, challan generation and access control. “We have raised $11 million so far to build this in house,” says Lakhotia. In some spots, there are ground sensors that give real-time parking status.

“Most of our aggregation has human supervision. It will take some more time to make ground sensors common,” adds Lakhotia, talking about the increasing role of technology in urban traffic and parking management. The company makes 10-15% margin from every booking and charges Rs 60-Rs 100 on an average per hour depending on the location. Gradually, the startup plans to introduce varied pricing depending on parking spot availability across various locations.

“So far we have not partnered with corporations or smart cities or governments. The challenge is in educating the public before doing that. There are several options to commute and whichever it is, parking is going to be a challenge for them,” opines Lakhotia, talking about challenges in the business. Park+ has been in operation since last October. “Coincidentally for us, traffic and demand for parking started surging since October last year. Starting operations during lockdown otherwise would have been difficult. It was also the right time to introduce contactless online booking, with digital payments for parking. We also reduced the time spent in searching for parking in crowded areas,” adds Lakhotia.