“Our frugal technology digitises any type of parking at the most affordable price” – By, Mr. Aman Singh, Head of IoT, Get My Parking
Early days – how did you start, what’s the eureka moment and how did you build the product?
Our founders Mr Chirag Jain (CEO) and Mr Rasik Pansare (CMO) both met in December 2012 during Jagriti Yatra; a 15-day train adventure where they travelled across India for 8000 km meeting entrepreneurs and change-makers. They remained in touch and started working on Get My Parking from 2015. Now it’s a funded startup with an ambitious team of 80+ talented members.
Early in 2015, we started reaching out to parking operators and there was huge traction in digitizing parking lots in NCR. Ujjain Kumbh Mela was the first big break where we were to work on a parking area for 2 lac cars spread across 400 acres. Our product was portable and scalable, hence it was easy to execute.
We got more funding over the next two years and we also became one of the preferred partners for the Smart Cities project. Towards the end of 2017, Europe’s No.1 car parking operator, APCOA partnered with us for advancing their parking platform across 13 countries. We have now brought modularity in the platform, which makes it more agile.
How did you establish your team initially?
The founders had no background exposure of the parking industry so despite the passion to solve the problem, they had hard time understanding the ground scenarios and had to get their hands dirty, spending 14 hours daily at parking lots. Even today our team is constantly on the frontline leading the parking revolution, but now there are 80+ of us. We have established our team mainly through referrals.
Can you please share background of the founders Mr. Chirag Jain & Mr. Rasik Pansare?
a) Chirag Jain: Chirag Jain is the CEO and Co-founder of GMP. Chirag graduated from Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2013 and worked in Automotive Industry for 2 yrs before starting his entrepreneurial journey. Chirag has keen interest in urban planning and was also awarded best delegate award at New York Global Young Leaders Summit under United Nations Development Program. He has spent over 6 months in S.Korea, 3 months in Malaysia and other S-E Asian countries, and has decent knowledge of the overall ecosystem.
b) Mr. Rasik Pansare: Entrepreneurial by attitude, Rasik is the Co-founder and CMO of Get My Parking. He graduated from FMS Delhi and was the President of entrepreneurship cell there. He is an engineer and MBA by education but always aspired to be a change-maker. An engaging storyteller, he has been a TEDx speaker, guest lecturer and speaker at several Smart City and IOT summits in past. He likes to create, connect and share. He was the first person in his MBA batch at FMS Delhi to get placed via a pre-placement offer from Pepsico, which he declined to pursue his entrepreneurial adventure with Chirag.
What is the Unique Selling Proposition of your business?
Our frugal technology digitises any type of parking at the most affordable price. Our suite of solutions integrates a complete smart parking ecosystem, which serves all the stakeholders involved, to organize the fragmented chaotic industry with data and execution.
What are the challenges you have faced to establish your company?
This sector has seen lot of innovation and automation over last 2 decades, mostly deployed in the developed economies. But all theexisting infrastructure has fragmented ownership and local, specialized systems which don’t gel with each other smoothly. Our strategy is to bring together all these existing hardware components together on our platform thereby creating an IoTlayer, which integrates the ecosystem. This enables us to give a seamless, hassle-free parking experience to the consumers.
How has your company evolved and grown?
We have pioneered the cloud-based digitisation of parking operations in India, with over 320 locations in Delhi NCR using our solutions. We process average 85,000 parking transactions on-ground everyday (45+ million till now.)
Is your company boot strapped or you outsourcing your investment?
We are funded through various investors, including Indian Angel Network (IAN), BEENEXT and IAN Fund. So far, we have raised an Angel Funding of INR 2.5 crore (Jan 2016), Pre Series Funding of INR 7.35 crore (Jan 2017) and Series A Funding of INR 19.2 crore (Oct 2017). We partnered with Europe’s Largest Parking Operator APCOA to Revolutionize Parking in 13 Countries in 2018.
Please share your future plans with us
Over the next 3-5 years, we wish to connect with Auto majors where in the parking app will be part of the car at the manufacturing stage. Increasingly, cars will become an entity as we head towards a world of driverless cars. Parking lots will need to become machines too and talk to the cars.
