SAN FRANCISCO — Parkade, a technology platform for managing private parking, has raised a $10 million Series A from real estate and “proptech” industry venture-capital firms to transform parking management for owners, managers, and investors.
The funding round was led by a trio of real estate and proptech investors: Navitas Capital, MassMutual Ventures, and 9Yards Capital. Existing investors CRV, Heartland and Box Group also joined the round.
Founded in 2018 by Evan Goldin and Ben Plowman, the startup was born out of Goldin’s personal and frustrating parking experience. He wasn’t offered guest parking at the apartment community he lived in, despite large numbers of spots sitting empty. Furthermore, his office parking at Lyft headquarters, where he was the company’s first product manager, was a nightmare. After reading the late UCLA professor Donald Shoup’s seminal work “The High Cost of Free Parking,” focused on better managing and pricing on-street parking, Goldin developed a custom spreadsheet to launch Lyft’s first paid parking program for its employees, and then teamed up with Ben Plowman to tackle the parking problem in multi-family.
“Where we live, where we travel, and how we get places — it’s all determined by parking,” Goldin said. “I was dumbfounded when I realized that, aside from the few public garages out there, this incredibly important asset is still being managed with spreadsheets, stickers and hang tags. Real estate owners and operators want to improve the efficiency and profitability of their parking operations, but they didn’t have the tools to do this until now. We’re bringing Shoup’s vision to off-street parking.”
Today, Parkade serves multi-family properties across the United States, Europe and Canada. The product has become the perfect end-to-end parking solution for private parking — mainly apartment communities. Parkade now offers integrated gate access, dynamic pricing, property-management software (PMS) integration with Yardi, Entrata, RealPage and more. Instead of property managers assigning spots, collecting payments, handling unauthorized parking, doling out gate access and more, Parkade automates everything.
“Parkade has been transformational to Sentral’s parking strategy, and we’re proud to be one of their first customers,” said Sarah Gallardo, Associate Vice President of Operations Services at innovative real estate firm Sentral. “Our residents and guests finally have the flexible parking options they craved, our team’s parking workload has dropped 90%, and our parking revenue has spiked by an average of 18% at all our Parkade sites –– with some reaching as high as 43%.”
Parkade now counts many of the largest owners and operators in the multi-family real estate industry as customers. With this fresh round of funding, they plan to significantly scale their product and operations, becoming the go-to way all apartment communities — and eventually all private buildings — manage their parking.
“Parking is one of the most important and under-monetized pieces of any real estate property,” said Travis Putnam, General Partner at Navitas Capital. “It’s often the largest source of revenue outside of the lease, yet it’s usually managed poorly with people and ad hoc processes. Parkade stands out as the only software solution comprehensive enough to enable properties to generate more revenue from parking, while doing less work and boosting resident satisfaction. It’s a rare win-win that makes it a must have for the industry.”
Parkade reports it grew revenue 21x since its seed round in 2022, and now has customers in 23 states.
