“We have partnered with Europe’s Largest Parking Operator APCOA to Revolutionize Parking in 13 Countries” – By, Mr. Rasik Pansare CMO & Co- Founder, Get My Parking
Q1. How was the company incepted? Details about the co-founders?
Despite having no background at the parking industry, the founders had a passion to solve this problem, as they themselves suffered with the parking issues. They had a hard time understanding the ground scenarios and had to get their hands dirty, spending 14 hours daily at parking lots. Even today the team is constantly on the front line leading the parking revolution, but now there are 80+ in the team. Parking is an issue for everyone, from drivers to merchants to city governments. And yet, you are forced to waste your time, fuel, and energy on parking problems. This system results in congestion and increased carbon emissions, but they also waste commuters’ time, lead to lost productivity and economic opportunities and can lead to inefficient city services.
a) Mr. Chirag Jain (CEO & Co-Founder): Chirag Jain is the CEO of GMP and he 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 South Korea, 3 months in Malaysia and other S-E Asian countries, and has sound knowledge of the overall ecosystem.
b) Mr. RasikPansare (CMO & Co-Founder): Entrepreneurial by attitude, Rasik is the co-founder and CMO of Get My Parking. He graduated from FMS Delhi and was the President of the 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.
Q2. Elaborate on the smart parking industry in India. The opportunities and the challenges present?
In recent years, there has been an increased global thrust on building ‘cities of the future’ or Smart Cities. These are smart in the sense of utilizing cutting-edge technologies to optimize asset use, build capacity, and employ their technology-enabled capabilities to become greener, safer, and more efficient. However, cities can’t be truly smart without smart parking.
Smart parking combines digitization of parking operations, sensor-based tracking, and data analytics to create efficient parking systems. A convergence between these approaches will reduce congestion on roads, help city planners devise optimum pricing, and make productive use of physical assets, ultimately easing urban mobility.
Parking in India is becoming a monstrous crisis, highly unorganized and painfully manual, where the industry sought to be begging for a solution. The solution when displayed to the parking contractors awed them so much that they branded it as “magic”, which highlights the absence of any technological disruption in the industry. The biggest challenge faced right was convincing government authorities of our expertise because they find hard to trust on a private vendor who began this venture hardly 4 years back. Another big challenge was to convince the parking lot holders to transform their lots digitally; the transition from hand written slips to digital tickets was a tough job.
Q3. What are the technologies that you deploy in your business?
GMP is an end-to-end digital platform that enables us to plug and play systems to handle specific requirements. Our objective towards building this platform is to have a flexible, robust and integrated solution for all parking use cases. Currently we are using these technologies: IOT, AWS Cloud, JAVA, MYSQL, Angular JS, Android, iOSetc
We have to ensure that our technology not only provides the most relevant solution to various parking problems but also does things sustainably so that it provides a long-term benefit. Being a tech company, we continuously strive to innovate new things and try to provide as much benefit as we can for the comfort of our parking industry.
Q4. What are your major achievements till date?
Get My Parking was conceived with a view to affordably digitize the global parkingindustry. We started with digitizing ticketing only and soon did so for the complete management suite of smart parking applications.
We have partnered with Europe’s Largest Parking Operator APCOA to Revolutionize Parking in 13 Countries, to customize and deploy an open IoT platform that provides a seamless mobility experience across all parking touch points. This digital platform will be scaled to all 13 countries in which APCOA operates more than 1.4 million car spaces at over 9000 locations. We have also had some pilots and projects in South East Asia. We believe this market will have more opportunities in the future. In India, we are present in major parkings in Delhi and have an extensive B2B product run by an extensive operations team.
Get My Parking has been awarded the ‘Travel app of the year- Emerging’ at the reputed AWS Mobility Awards 2017. We have been felicitated among 36 exceptional start ups from over 600 across India at the India UK TECH Summit 2016. Also One of the Top 3 winners of IBM India Smart Camp 2016 out of more than 100 startups working on Smart City solutions across India.
Q5. How do you plan to take your business forward?
Smart parking solution can make cities economically productive, less polluting and wasteful of resources. It is not just about managing the parking spaces. It is about making transportation simplified. The market opportunity for parking is estimated to be over $100 billion. Our vision is to make parking a sub-conscious experience. We are doing that by digitizing parking, globally. And yes, we are on track to achieve it. It’s not even been 3 years, so we are just getting started.
We aim to create future-proof parking and full proof parking technology and connect parking industry internally as well as with urban mobility players.
@Technuter.com News Service
