South African startup Parket provides a turnkey digital parking solution to handle access, payments and management of parking lots for retail, residential and commercial properties.
Founded in 2019 by Joshua Raphael, Parket has developed a parking solution that offers better convenience for landlords, visitors and tenants, and was the first company in South Africa to take high volume parking lots ticketless.
“It is more cost effective for landlords and much more sustainable for greener buildings. We not only provide complete turkey digital infrastructure based on license plate reader access, advanced management software and digital payments, but we also have a VIP experience parking app that allows users to add their license plates and bank cards. and simply drive in and out of our parking lots for automated access and payments,” said Raphael.
Raphael launched Parket after witnessing people struggling to find parking in the streets of Cape Town’s CBD, when some buildings were merely 70 per cent occupied. He built a website that became the “Airbnb for parking” to bridge these two markets. Parket began to roll out to more buildings and started to work on the access control to complement the solution.
“COVID-19 struck, and revenue went to zero, but slowly started to creep back in late-2020. After growing month-on-month in revenue and onboarding more parking lots, Parket started receiving angel funding and growing the team,” Raphael said.
It released the Parket app in early 2021, and also began work on management software to complement the app and license plate reader access.
“As we focused on gaining more parking lots and building on the product, we began to build and develop around allowing parking lot visitors to pay without requiring an app. This developed into our “scan to pay” service, which allowed users to pay for the license plates with SnapScan, Zapper and card on their phones,” said Raphael.
“This allowed us to introduce ticketless parking for small parking lots with Parket, without the capex investment of big machines. As we gained more parking lots we noticed some audiences were averse to using their phones or new technology, so we continued to refine the solution for this audience, which resulted in our “smartkiosk” which allows visitors to type in license plates and pay using the above payment methods with no phone needed.”
Parket’s turnkey digital solution is now onboarding high volume parking lots, and is close to processing 100,000 visitors a month. The startup, which has three prominent angel investors, is primarily bootstrapped, and finally reaching sufficient volumes.
“Uptake was relatively slow and laborious in the early years. We managed to secure a few nice buildings through one landlord, but I had to learn B2B sales and it felt like getting an honours degree,” said Raphael.
“I had to dedicate time to finding more customers. Sales cycles were long and required a lot of persistence, as Parket had not built a name for itself yet. As Parket’s product grows and as we develop our product and gain high profile customers, the network effect seems to be kicking off.”
Parket currently only operates in South Africa, but is discussing partnerships abroad to take its product offshore.
“We have a large base in Cape Town with plans to grow in Johannesburg and KZN soon. We will be hiring staff in these provinces shortly,” said Raphael.
The startup has different business models tailored to its clients’ needs.
“Some clients have a lot of vacant parking space, so we take a commission on generating revenue for the client. Others would like to replace their existing parking equipment entirely with our ticketless solution, for which we offer a monthly fee, capex or a cost-per-transaction,” Raphael said.
“We are quite flexible with tailoring our pricing according to our client needs. Our revenue is growing month-on-month.”
