Parkloco provides data for parking industry start-up co-founded by thai in boston
A capstone project for the master course at Brown University has been turned into a start-up providing data analytics for the parking industry.
Parkloco is the start-up based in Boston that was co-founded by a Thai student-turned-entrepreneur, Napatsapa Vajarodaya, who is the company’s chief operating officer.
Napatsapa graduated in chemistry from Chulalongkorn University and earned a master of science in innovation management and entrepreneurship at Brown.
Like many other parking start-ups, Parkloco wanted to develop an app that helps people find parking spots in real time, but discovered that there were about 26 such apps out there already and none of them could crack the code of solving the parking problem.
During market research on about 35 parking lots, Napatsapa saw what the current state of data infrastructure of the parking industry looked like.
Then, she and her friend spotted an opportunity in the parking data industry.
“That was when we pivoted our business from an app to a data play,” she said.
Parking is a huge business. In the US alone, it is a $30 billion (Bt1 trillion) industry.
Many people and companies have been trying to solve the parking problem for a very long time.
Tech-perspective people are trying to solve this problem through consumers (building apps) but no one was able to be “the solution” yet.
“We are sure that to use technology to solve the parking problem, we have to attack from the supply side, which is parking garages,” she said.
Parkloco brings data analytics to the parking industry.
Its analytics software platform helps parking lot owners understand their business and drives revenue by providing real-time occupancy statistics and actionable insights into customer traffic.
Using this real-time data, Parkloco can optimise pricing, efficiently manage staff and directly reach customers. It can also push real-time data to consumer-facing channels.
“We integrated into the point-of-sale system that already exists at the parking location. We extract real time as well as historic transactional data from that system.
“Then we overlay machine learning algorithms and produce a smart online platform/dashboard for the parking lot owners for them to better understand their facility and make better decisions,” she said.
The business model is to push Parkloco through channel partners by integrating Parkloco into the existing POS system – the parking gates.
Any parking lot anywhere in the world with the gate system or any system that has a data trail can use Parkloco.
The company is working with national parking operators and currently Parkloco is live in three cities.
The beauty of Parkloco is optimising the parking garage business with actionable insights by providing analytics-based data that will drive revenue.
Parkloco aggregates a garage’s customer behaviours from all parking locations, tracks, calculates and predicts their parking ebbs and flows.
There is no additional cost for installing hardware. Parkloco easily integrates with a parking garage’s current POS system.
“Our target customers are parking garages. We are definitely looking to attack the international market once we cover the US market,” she said.
The company’s goal, just like other startups, is to exit in three to five years.
“We are currently a team of six people, five full time and one part time.
“We are in the process of doing a channel partnership with property management groups and
parking operator groups,” she said.
Parkloco received initial funding from an accelerator programme, DreamIT venture.
“We applied right after graduation. Out of 400 applicants, they selected 12 to participate in the programme.
“It is a standard accelerator programme; giving you $25,000 cash up front and taking 6-per-cent equity in your company,” she said.
The accelerator programme gave Napatsapa three months of free office space, mentorship, legal resources and networking with local investors.
After that programme ended, the company moved back to the Boston area.
“We started by using the Brown alumni network, reaching out to them and asking for advice on how to get to venture capital or angel investors.
“With some research and networking, I cold email, send LinkedIn requests and ask them for meetings,” she said.
Parkloco just closed its seed round of funding in April for a little over $500,000.
And it is planning on raising funds again by the end of this year to scale this product up nationwide.
“For myself, I would like to be a great advocate for minority female entrepreneurs, not only in the US but also in SEA (Southeast Asia),” she said.
