At Parkade, we think of ourselves as the parking company that hates parking. 

We want consumers to have safe, convenient places to leave their vehicle, of course. But we can’t stand how parking works today. 

It’s poorly managed, poorly priced, poorly enforced, inflexible and often not available when consumers need it the most. All of which results in something everyone should hate: Developers build way too much parking to make sure they have “enough,” paving over housing, vibrant downtowns and even paradise.  

Developers, for their part, have been building less parking since the turn of the 21st century. In tandem, governments have relaxed “parking requirements,” especially near transit, to lower housing costs and boost public transit ridership. That effort has been aided by a nascent “parking-reform movement,” led by the recently passed UCLA professor Donald Shoup.

Less excess parking should be a great thing, but only if it makes the lives of everyday residents better. When parking is still managed like it was last century — with pen, paper, spreadsheets and stickers — scarce parking makes everyone hate parking even more. NIMBY’ing the proposed housing down the street that might use more street parking is a huge problem if you can’t rely on off-street parking.

That’s where Parkade comes in.

As real-estate developers, governments and parkers have discovered over the last few years, using Parkade’s technology to manage off-street parking makes parking work like a dream, for everyone, and helps solve the parking crunch while reducing “hidden taxes on poverty” for those that don’t need parking. And it means developers can have an answer for the NIMBY opposition that kills housing proposals, while still meeting the needs of their residents, employees, visitors and neighbors.

“In 2021, we partnered with Parkade to create a better system for managing our more than 10,000 parking spots,” said Jeremiah Thomas, COO of Ohio-based real-estate developer Crawford Hoying, Parkade’s first customer. “Since then, parking has become easier to navigate for our residents and property management teams, and we’re now able to utilize overflow spaces for visitors and the public. Through the use of Parkade, our parking income has increased throughout the portfolio, in a recent case by nearly 70%, allowing for new projects to be financed and built faster.”

Thanks to skyrocketing growth from early customers like Crawford Hoying, Parkade is announcing today that some of the biggest names in real estate have invested $10 million in Parkade’s Series A, at a $50 million valuation. 

Parkade is already a beloved tool for our customers. With the official backing of the residential real-estate industry, we’re cementing our status as the go-to parking technology for multi-family apartments. Additionally, the capital will set up Parkade to scale throughout the apartment industry, and across the country. 

We’re excited to bring on Navitas Capital, whose backers include a who’s who of America’s best and largest residential real-estate owners and managers, as our lead investor in the round. We also welcome new investors Mass Mutual Ventures — owner of Barings, a large real-estate owner and asset manager — and real-estate-focused venture capital firm Nine Yards. Returning investors CRV, Box Group and Heartland Ventures also participated. 

“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.”

Over the last year, Parkade has rolled out a slew of features that have made Parkade the best end-to-end parking solution for apartment communities. Instead of property managers being tasked with assigning spots, collecting payments, handling unauthorized parking, doling out gate access and more, Parkade automates everything. And our property-management integration with Yardi, Entrata, RealPage and more makes launching and maintaining Parkade a breeze. 

“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%.”

Thanks to our customers and our team’s constant product updates, Parkade has: 

• Processed $45m in parking payments 
• Grown revenue 21x since our seed round in 2022
• Customers in 23 states and 3 other countries

We’re humbled by the growth we’ve seen, and incredibly thankful for the early customers who adopted Parkade’s game-changing technology in its nascent stages. 

With this additional capital, we’ll be investing even more heavily in improving Parkade’s technology — adding to recent upgrades like our mobile Patrol app, parking validation tools to offer discounts and mapping upgrades. 

As we look forward to the future, we’re energized to help buildings around the country make their parking work better for their tenants, visitors and neighbors. Someday, trusted Parkade customers should be able to park in any Parkade building — even if you’re not a tenant. Doing that would make parking easy and massively reduce America’s parking needs, so we can rip up that excess parking, and restore our excess asphalt to much-needed paradise.

That, we believe, would leave us with parking we don’t hate.