Tired Of Circling Around? This Startup Will Help You Find Parking Space In Less Than 3 Seconds Park+ is currently providing services in Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai, with plans to enter other cities soon

Finding a parking space in cities can be exasperating. We all have probably faced the situation and are accustomed to the practice of leaving early for our destination to avoid traffic snarls and locate a parking spot. A study conducted by Frost Sullivan revealed that an average commuter spends around 80 hours—or over 240 km— yearly to find a parking space in Delhi. The numbers may slightly vary from city to city, but won't be much different.

To address this issue and save those crucial hours spent scouring for a parking space, ex vice-president of Paytm, Amit Lakhotia came up with Park+, a smart parking solution in 2019. In an exclusive interaction with Entrepreneur India, Lakhotia gives an insight about his startup and tells us how it is helping Indian drivers.

Hunger For Business

Helping companies to reach their targets isn't new for Lakhotia. He has played a crucial role in the successful growth of MakeMyTrip, Paytm, and Tokopedia. Taking pride in his previous stints he said, "I have been part of MakeMyTrip, built the entire Paytm wallet, which is well liked by merchants, and then helped Tokopedia to attract around a billion dollars in GMV (gross merchandise value) in 2-3 years."

These successful stints boosted his confidence and made him realize that he can now start his own company.

"Even after working with these big firms, I couldn't suffice my hunger to build something new," added Lakhotia. Eventually, he started observing problems faced by common people and came up with the idea of Park+.

Inception

"The idea first struck me when I was waiting for my turn to park my vehicle in Paytm's parking space. It took us around 10-15 minutes of waiting time," said Lakhotia.

According to him, people who were late for their meetings had to face difficulties due to the limited parking space. Failing to secure a space in the parking place, most of his peers had to park their vehicles on the road with a fear it might get towed away.

Park+ runs a mobile app-based platform that offers an automated parking system and cloud-based security solution for parking discovery, booking, payments, and tracking.

According to Lakhotia, the app helps commuters find parking space instantly and without spending any additional fuel.

Park+ is BookMyShow For Parking

Commuters with the help of the app will enter the destination and look for a parking space in the area. Once he spots an area, he will reserve the parking spot, pay online and get an instant e-parking ticket. The app will then navigate the commuter to the parking spot.

Because of the easy interface, Lakhotia likes to call the product as BookMyShow for parking.

He said the app will utilize the empty parking space available and will bring it under use, thus resulting in profit for the commuter as well as for the parking space owner.

Explaining it further, he said, "Suppose you are planning to go to a coffee shop for a meeting, but there is no parking space left. In this scenario, our app will guide you to the nearest available space which can be a five star hotel's parking space or a corporate office's underground parking zone. This will bring convenience to both commuter and parking space owner."

Their app will further help the government to understand which localities lack parking and where there is abundance of parking space, thus helping them to construct more parking space in required areas.

Park+ is currently providing its services in Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai, with plans to enter other cities soon.

COVID Impact and Social Distancing Solutions for Malls

Just like others, Park+ failed to escape the clutch of stringent lockdown imposed in India due to the COVID-19 outbreak. "Our customer usage slumped by 90-95 per cent in the first two months of the lockdown," added Lakhotia. However, with Unlock 1, where the economic activities are restarted to revive the economy, Lakhotia believes there will be a gradual rise in the number of users.

In June, Lakhotia announced a tech-driven social distancing solution for malls. With this new product, malls can regulate entry and exit of visitors, record their temperature, calculate real time count of the visitors, and provide contactless parking.

"The idea is to assure visitors that they can enter malls without getting contracted with the virus. As for malls, it will help them to enable contact tracing and elevate customer experience without flouting any safety protocols," added Lakhotia. Currently, five to six malls in Delhi have agreed to collaborate with Park+.