News in brief:

• SpotHero, a Chicago-based parking inventory startup raises the capital of $50 million.
• The total capital of SpotHero is calculated at $118 million.
• The company is looking forward to expanding its business to 300 cities in the US and Canada.
• In August, SpotHero launched its another app “ SpotHero for Fleets”.

A parking inventory and booking startup, SpotHero just raised $50 million in a Series D fundraiser round help by Macquarie Capital. It is an Illinois-based company that built an on-demand parking app, that uses underutilized parking spaces.

According to the company, the organizations participated in the round are― Union Grove Venture Partners, Insight Venture Partners, Global Founders Capital, OCA Ventures, AutoTech Ventures, and others. SpotHero has bagged $118 million in investments to date.

The CEO and co-founder of SpotHero, Mark Lawrence remarked that the capital accumulated from the fundraiser events will be used for expanding the reach to 300 US and Canadian cities. The company plans to build out its digital platform and reinforce partnerships with mobility solutions providing agencies.

The initial idea behind developing the SpotHero Parking app was to develop software that can connect drivers to vacant parking spots. It would use hundreds of garages across North America and guide the everyday drivers to them.

The main mastermind behind the app is its software. It can sit on top of the 40 or so point-of-sale systems utilized by parking garages. Now, this poses as a single protocol that allows SpotHero to initiate a kind of standardization to a system that is otherwise fragmented. Through this single protocol, the company can instill new and improved features into its app that will support automated parking services. It includes license plate recognition.

The CEO stated―“We’ve built the pipes, so to speak, and this powers our consumer app,” He also added that the company’s focus now is on building sustainable partnerships, and adding ultimate features in the software and services.

The capital raised, according to the company, will be used for the completion of the company’s goals mentioned above. SpotHero currently has a company size of 210 employees and is adamant on hiring 50 more engineers.

With the time span of 8 years since its launch, SpotHero grew like an unchecked wildfire. It has expanded its focus beyond the core consumer-centric competency by adding other services. It is due to the incessantly growing urban density and jumbled on-street parking, all thanks to increased traffic, ride-hailing, and on-demand delivery services taking up all the curb space. 

SpotHero has locked in 900+ distribution partnerships that include Google Assistant for voice-enabled parking, Waze in-app navigation to parking, Hertz and car2go for fleet parking purposes, WeWork for commuter parking and finally, Moovit for multi-modal parking.

To speak of its exponential growth, SpotHero recently launched its new service named “SpotHero for Fleets” in August, that aim at shared mobility and on-demand services. Meaning, it is becoming a one-stop-shop, handling relations between garage owners and the customers to keep the demand-supply factor at equilibrium.

It is due to this new service that users can secure a parking spot even in a hot-traffic zone. It is available across multiple cities and enables the users to pay per use across different facilities on one streamlined invoice.

Looking at the current picture of On-demand app development, it is certainly going to disrupt other sectors of industries, just as innovatively as it has done the parking domain.

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