How Park+ aims to build a super app for car owners
In a conversation with YourStory’s Daily Dispatch, Amit Lakhotia, Founder of Park+ unpacks the brand’s growth strategy and plans for the future
Gurugram-based Parking solutions platform recently announced its $25 million fundraise in Series B round of funding led by Sequoia Capital India, Matrix Partners India, and Epiq Capital. Existing and new investors such as AdvantEdge, Fund II-A Series of Somani Investments LP, and Motherson Lease Solution Limited also pitched in.
These funds, according to the company, will be used to advance its technology and accelerate the development of solutions for cars and car owners. Founded in July 2019 by Amit Lakhotia, ex-VP of Paytm Payments, the startup secured $11 million in funding last year.
“At Park+, we are trying to build a super app for car owners. So, anything and everything around the car happens on a single platform,” says Amit, Founder, Park+.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Jack Ma, along with Founder of Park+ Amit Lakhotia
The app-based platform helps in parking, FASTag management, and car insurance, among others. It provides cloud-based automation solutions for parking to B2B (business-to-business) organisations as well as regular commuters.
At present, Park+ has over two million cars on its platform which, Amit says, is 5 percent of the total cars in India. By December 2022, the brand plans to scale it to at least 25-30 percent of the total cars in India onto its platform.
Amit highlights two focus areas while talking about the startup’s expansion plans — increasing the use cases for its existing users and expanding services to more locations.
“Go deeper in existing categories where we are, get more geographies in, build cases and then add categories like insurance,” he says.
The startup is present in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Chennai. Going forward, the company plans to expand presence in over 25 to 30 cities in the next 12 months.
In its effort to become a super app for cars and car owners, the platform will gradually extend partnerships for car-related segments. According to Amit, it has partnered with CarDekho and Spinny for selling second hand vehicles on the platform.
The brand has also collaborated with app-based security platform MyGate and smart mobility solution provider Bounce.
The partnership with Bounce is a strategic move to build a robust EV ecosystem across the country by setting up over 3,500 battery swapping stations across 10 cities. The locations of these stations are expected to be built in residential societies, malls, corporate offices, among others.
Park plans to build this super app majorly with partnerships and for segments where partnerships aren’t available, it will be building full-stack services, Amit concludes.
Edited by Affirunisa Kankudti