As more and more offices, businesses, and institutions cautiously open their doors and more and more vehicles ply the streets, one of Delhi’s capital headaches is said to return: where do you park your vehicle? While finding a mere parking space can add more time than you would care to account to any kind excursion, be it for business or pleasure, Park Plus (Stylized as Park+) hopes to find a solution to the problem.
Park+ is a Delhi-based start-up, founded by Amit Lakhotia, who wants to change the way middle-class and upper-class Indians park their cars. It provides a suite of solutions around parking. With the Park+ app, users can discover parking, book their slot and other services such as car wash, and pay digitally. The app also provides RFID based security solutions to apartments and corporate setups. Currently, their systems are installed at 300+ sites.
The idea for the app came to Lakhotia when he was working with PayTM at their Noida office. “Driving to Noida from Delhi would take me an hour, and then there was the problem of finding parking daily. Since our office only had a few designated parking spaces, the only other options were the government and metro parking lots, which would also fill up fast, leaving you only with the road.” Lakhotia vividly recalls having to keep leaving the office building to check whether his car had been stolen or towed away.
That’s when the seed of Park+ was planted, coming to fruition last year when Lakhotia returned from a stint at Tokopedia in Indonesia. “I realised that thanks to apps like Zomato, Swiggy, digital payments had become so ubiquitous that people had become used to going digital for any kind of service. And even the parking attendants are now comfortable with apps.
There was an opportunity to provide an interface between those looking for parking and those who could provide it,” says Lakhotia. With over three lakh cars already having the RFID tags, Park+ is becoming common, with the company adding 40,000 new users on a monthly basis.
Today, Park+ is available in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, and recently launched tech-driven social distancing solutions for malls, providing a one stop solution for contactless car parking. This is in tandem with it becoming the first company to collaborate with Aarogya Setu app for crowd management in malls. “Earlier, even car owners were using their vehicles infrequently as for certain tasks it was easier to get a cab. Now, with everyone being so safety conscious, they want to use their own vehicle, but still need to find parking. We facilitate their finding a parking spot as well as payments to ensure that they have a safe contactless driving experience,” concludes Lakhotia.