Austin-based startup FlashParking has raised $60 million from L Catterton’s Growth Fund, the company announced Wednesday.
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FlashParking sells its parking technology to parking garage owners or managers. The company operates pretty much everywhere in the United States where there’s paid parking, CEO Juan Rodriguez said in an interview with Crunchbase News. With the new funding, it plans to grow in its current markets and expand into others.
The company, which was founded in 2011, has raised less than $5 million in funding to date, Rodriguez said. It raised a $1.25 million Series A in 2012 and another $3 million in 2016, with investors including Austin Ventures and Geekdom Fund.
But still, FlashParking has grown 100 percent for “pretty much the last seven years in a row,” Rodriguez said, and the company achieved profitability about two years ago.
The Parking Garage Of The Future
FlashParking wants to bring its “mobility hubs” mainstream. Instead of parking garages being simply a space for cars, the company intends to provide a suite of services.
“It’s transforming the parking garage of today to what the parking garage of the future will look like,” Rodriguez said. That means fewer parking garages with cars just sitting in them, and more that have electric vehicle charging stations, oil change, cleaning and other maintenance services, and deliveries to cars.
Rideshare drivers, for example, could use parking garages as staging areas where they could stop to use the restroom or grab a snack and get back on the road when they need to, Rodriguez said.
“We have a ton of information and we’re connected to all of them [customers] and we’ll be creating all of these credentials so these partners can conduct other non-parking related activities inside the mobility hub,” he said.
The company currently has about 150 employees and plans to double its workforce. The goal is to capture about 40 percent of the U.S. market in the next three to five years, Rodriguez said.
Illustration Credit: Li-Anne Dias
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