Co-Founded by Chirag Jain, Get My Parking is an award-winning provider of Interoperable Digital Parking Platform that integrates any parking equipment and connects it to mobile and cloud for a standardized seamless experience.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to quarantine and shelter-at-home orders, decreasing parking activity and resulting in shutdowns and closures of parking facilities nationwide. From empty garages to micro-mobility service disruptions and lay-offs, now more than ever, parking departments must respond to the community’s needs and help to ensure the safety of their staff. During the lockdown peak, there was a fall of nearly 50% to 70% in commuters who used monthly parking facilities. In contrast, the transient parking facilities saw a reduction of 95% compared to what it was last year. Educational and work establishments like universities, schools, and offices have shifted to virtual learning and working arrangement. Therefore, parking, transit, and other mobility services have been hit hard. But after the unlock began and people started moving again, safety and hygiene became the number-one priority in all public places. People started expecting touchless services even when it came to parking.
Any parking owner like municipal corporations, housing societies, corporate campuses, and real estate owners can save thousands of dollars per entry lane 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 parking owners. In the last 3 months, our sales team has seen more interest and action globally than ever before. “As people in India and around the world stay put in their homes, the parking industry has invariably taken a hit. We also had witnessed a temporary decline in transactions on our platform”, says Chirag Jain, Co-Founder & CEO, Get My Parking.
An Urban Planning Enthusiast
Considering Steve Jobs as the innovator of the century, Chirag co-founded the smart parking startup with Rasik Pansare in 2015. A keen interest in urban planning and a strong desire to contribute to society in some meaningful way motivated them to start their entrepreneurial journey. Chirag was working in the automotive technology startup when he saw that a lot was being done in the connected car space and other related services, parking was practically an untouched area. “This led me to think of a way to solve the digitization puzzle of unorganized parking. I teamed up with Rasik, and we started working on this as an experiment. By July 2015, we were convinced with the early results to plunge into this business full time and started to Get My Parking officially”, says Chirag.
Digitizing and upgrading the parking infrastructure using IoT software to become intelligent mobility hubs, Get My Parking is a SaaS business model with easy customizations to accelerate the adoption. This helps parking operators, landlords, and smart city governments to quickly and effectively modernize their parking services without the need for replacing what they have. As a result, they can offer value-added services like EV charging, car servicing, washing, insurance and many more for user convenience and integrate with new mobility models like shared mobility, last-mile mobility, deliveries, and logistics. Envisioning to make every parking transaction a sub-conscious experience, Chirag says, “With a strong foundation of the team, technology, and partnerships, we are creating a future-proof parking platform to connect the parking industry internally as well as with urban mobility players”.
A Businessman by Blood
Born and brought up in a business family, Chirag graduated from IIT Madras in 2013 and worked for two years in a leading automotive tech portal, learning the ins-and-outs of the mobility industry. “This is where my desire for solving urban issues was strengthened and nurtured. Throughout my experience, I spent over 6 months in South Korea, 3 months in Malaysia and other South-East Asian countries that gave me a global perspective about how severe the parking problem is”, says Chirag.
Most people pursue the path of entrepreneurship either because they want a lifestyle that isn’t bound by nine-to-five or because their creativity doesn’t fit the narrow box of the existing world. While these are great and genuine reasons, Chirag’s decision to become an entrepreneur was mainly guided by his desire to solve urban mobility issues, primarily the aspect of parking, which lay completely overlooked by most mobility players. “I knew that if I wanted to bring about a change in this area, there was no way I could do it by taking the well-trodden path”, points out Chirag.
Each year brings new learnings, new milestones, and new challenges, but the journey to digitize every parking globally is just getting started. Being the product pioneer, Get My Parking has grown exponentially in all terms. “Our revenues have grown about 100x since the first year while the number of parking lots digitized is over 2200 globally. Today, we process roughly 2 million parking transactions every month”, adds Chirag.
In India, Get My Parking is present in 11 cities, including Delhi NCR, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Mumbai in terms of active deployments. Get My Parking is the largest aggregator and distributor of parking information in terms of static parking data, with comprehensive data of over 9000 parking lots located in 50 cities in India. Globally, Get My Parking has over 2200 active smart parking deployments with work orders in 17 countries. Their single IoT platform has launched 7 different white label parking apps worldwide in different languages and markets.
Expanding with a Strong Team
Having a strong team since the beginning, Chirag and Rasik have been particular about the people they brought into the core team. A close-knit family with complementary skills, the team comes from stellar backgrounds and has been critical in forming the organization. Being a fast-growing company, the biggest challenge for Chirag is always hiring the right people, training and upskilling the current team members, and maintaining the right culture. He adds, “Being the market creator and pioneer, it takes a lot of convincing to influence the entire industry from scratch. We also faced funding issues several times during our fledgeling stages but have mastered the financial equation over the last couple of years with a good inflow of revenues”.
Having performed extensive deployments in Europe and Asia for some of the largest parking operators that operate across thousands of locations, Get My Parking has been expanding its footprints focusing on the American market and Middle East Asia. “This latest expansion move is supported by our partnership with ParkTrans, an American smart city solution provider that brings the latest global technology to its American clients. We are also creating a global sales network with freelance consultants as well as sales enterprise partners”, concludes Chirag.