In Chicago, like many places, finding parking can sometimes be a nightmare. So SpotHero provides a platform where you can buy or sell parking spots.
And now its business is accelerating. On Thursday, SpotHero announced that it raised a $50 million Series D funding round. That brings the company’s total funding to $118 million.
SpotHero lets people search for off-street parking spots near a specific location, then rank results by price or distance. People can book parking spots at both hourly and monthly rates. The company also provides a platform for parking companies to sell their unused spots, effectively addressing the needs of the buyer and seller.
SpotHero lists parking spots from nearly 7,000 facilities in 300 cities across the U.S. and Canada. It has helped millions of drivers find spots.
So far, 2019 has been a big year for the company. It has passed $500 million in all-time sales — the majority of that money made within the past year — and it’s on track to reach one billion in sales within the next year.
Besides that, SpotHero has been making some big announcements this year. It unveiled SpotHero for Fleets, which reserves parking spots for fleets of vehicles. This comes in handy for car-sharing services, but also sets the stage for autonomous vehicles.
As innovative companies continue to make self-driving cars a reality for modern cities, SpotHero wants to make sure it can help these vehicles with parking.
“We’re laying the digital infrastructure for autonomous vehicles,” SpotHero CEO and cofounder Mark Lawrence told Built In. “Autonomous vehicles have similar parking needs to consumer vehicles — reserved spots, easy ins and outs — so we want to be ready for them whenever they come.”
The company has also partnered with Waze for seamless navigation to parking spots, Google Assistant for voice assistant integration and WeWork for commuter parking, among others. And it rolled out SpotHero for Business for employees and employers.
Lawrence told Built In that the new funding will go towards strengthening SpotHero’s partnerships, as well as signing new ones. The company also wants to put the funding toward scaling its digital parking marketplace and hiring swaths of people — including 50 engineers.
“We launched SpotHero because of our own parking frustrations,” Lawrence told Built In. “We’re just getting started.”
