A few years ago the Indian Startup ecosystem was at a nascent stage. Startups blooming in different domains, few of them were inventing and few others were trying to copy and make better versions. As such, it was not that clear what could be the parameters to grant the funding.

Tridib Konwar and Mriganka Deka, Co-founders of ParkingRhino

Seeing the large opportunity in parking business in expanding and unsaturated marketplace due to rapid urbanization, increase in vehicle population, shared mobility and data collaboration ParkingRhino has developed a smart data platform to help find and manage to park and also solving other mobility use cases.

ParkingRhino – Smart City App

ParkingRhino has secured INR 3.85 Cr in seed funding 9 months ago. The vision was to upgrade its AI and IoT technology platform, team building & market acquisition. They have changed the way people find parking spaces and share mobility information.

Within 9 months of funding, they have reached 5X growth in revenue using AI, IoT and Cloud technology. They are clocking in 120,000 transactions a day and capturing + 1 million data points every day. Speaking of B2B partnerships, they have partnered with key mobility & digital players including Smart city, Car & Bike sharing, Vehicle OEM manufacturer, Mapping companies, Retailers, Digital wallets, voice skills etc.

Recently they extended their geo base in the Philippines across 4 cities. In India, they are in 15 cities and expanding in 25 cities in the next 9 months. With respect to impact, they provided smart parking with real-time parking information during Kumbhmela (India’s largest event) for 48 days in Prayagraj, UP. 800K+ parking transactions were handled with real-time IoT technology with ease where 120M+ people used mobile connectivity in a single place. The smart system was possible through geo-fencing the parking location with IoT and mobile app based smart parking technology.

• Govt. and Civic bodies added clear parking policies due to an increase in vehicle population and congestion. But there is considerable delay in technology mapping with those regulations

• There are multiple benefits a startup company can avail from Governments but participating in a tender with financial, experience and other criteria mentioned in the RFP has been a challenge. As a result, we were forced to find the right consortium partner to every Govt. tender.

Also, streamlining the unstructured parking management system and digitizing the system was not an easy move. 

In spite of these hurdles, the team steered the wheel and found out solutions that could find a middle way in supporting each other and yet placing ParkingRhino’s solutions in the place. After much hustle and growth in the last 9 months, they are now looking to raise another round of funding of $5 Million.

With the next round of funding, the product roadmap includes:

• Developing solutions to forecast parking occupancy via Artificial Intelligence’s deep neural network method. This will minimize the dependency of collecting the availability from parking sensors.