For residents of Indian metropolitan cities, excessive traffic during office peak hours, weekends, and public holidays isn’t anything unexpected. Although the government made significant investments and developed these locations’ public transport systems to combat this, we continue to see thousands of private vehicles on the highways every day.
Heavy traffic on the roads and a lack of parking spaces go hand in hand. Finding a space to park your car has turned into a strenuous task on its own. Targeting to organize the smart parking sector, Dhananjaya Bharadwaj and Abhimanyu Singh together started ParkMate in 2021.
Having done extensive research for a paper about this market, Bharadwaj said, “A car owner wastes up to 5 days and burns fuel up to 100 liters in a year in searching for vacant parking. In Delhi alone one crore cars are parked every day. The minimum parking transaction on a weekday is around 40 crore and on a weekend it goes to 220 crores. Out of all these transactions, under 12% goes to the government.”
Delhi-based ParkMate is a tech-enabled SaaS solution offering valet parking services. The usage is pretty simple, once the user puts in the destination location, the company’s parking buddy collects the car and parks it. The car is then delivered to where the user is when needed. The company aggregates existing municipal and private parking operators on the platform as valets and shares the revenue with them.
The platform charges a fee of Rs 49 for pick and drop per vehicle and an additional parking ticket is charged depending on the location. If the parking space is private the ticket charges go directly to the person in charge and if it is a paid government parking space, it goes to the organization.
Available in Delhi NCR and Lucknow, ParkMate has more than 72,000 paying users out of which 59.7 % users are repeat customers. It sees around 42% of its customer base from Delhi and the rest 58% from Lucknow. With a m-o-m growth rate of 12.2%, it saw 12,000 users last month.
Although its operations only 10 months back, the company has managed to raise ana undisclosed amount from We Founder Circle last year and has a valuation of $2.1 million. In talks with VCs, the organization is looking to close its current funding round by May.
Having seen interest rising from Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Ahmedabad, the company is soon to extend its services to Mumbai.
As of 2022, the global smart parking systems market was valued at $6.49 billion, this is expected to grow at a CAGR of 22.1% by 2030. ParkMate is up against Secure Parking India, Get My Parking and ParkSmart that cater to the same market.
