Finding parking is frustrating. Homeowners and businesses often have unused driveways and open spots.
A new startup out of Vancouver, B.C. wants to bring the two sides together with a smartphone.
Garage is launching later this month in Seattle with a “shared parking model” that lets owners of parking spots rent them out to drivers.
“Think of it like AirBnB for parking,” says Garage CEO and co-founder Sam Chandola.
Chandola, who previously founded a game design and development studio called Victory Square Games, came up with the idea for Garage after buying a car and then realizing how hard it was to park.
Garage is fairly simple. Those with parking spots can upload their information into the app, like location, availability, and a hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly price. Those that are looking for parking can use the app to find a spot and pay with their smartphone. Garage takes a small cut of every transaction; however, the more friends you invite to use Garage, the more this service fee goes down.
There are several other companies also trying to do something similar. For example, back in April we wrote about Citifyd, a Portland-based startup also trying to be the “Airbnb for parking.”
But Chandola noted how there “is no No. 1 player in the market at this point of time.”
“All the startups are a few months old and are in validation mode where they try everything out in their home cities,” he said.
Garage says it differentiates from competition with a large inventory and a focus on business parking spots. The company is targeting small to mid-sized businesses that have spots which aren’t used all the time, particularly at night.
“We’re giving businesses an alternate source of revenue while opening up more options for consumers,” Chandola said.
Garage’s over-arching mission is to create “shared parking for smarter cities,” Chandola added.
“Cities have lots of parking spots — most of them are just unavailable to the general public, and so new parkades have to be built, which makes cities more concrete and less green,” he explained. “We want to make the unavailable spots available to the public to reduce the need for more concrete.”
Though Garage is based in Vancouver, Chandola picked Seattle as his company’s first launch city because “parking is a bigger problem, the city planning is more road centric, and more tech companies moving to Seattle means more employees who will be driving and looking for parking.”
The 6-person company, which has raised $100,000 thus far, also plans to launch in Vancouver and Sao Paulo, Brazil later this month. Garage joins other startups like on-demand valet services Luxe and Zirx that are trying to help Seattleites with their parking needs, particularly as the city experiences an economic boom led largely by the tech industry.
