JOIN USPParkE eyes building parking infra, contributes to Smart Cities
Many metropolitan cities including Bengaluru are facing a daunting task with parking. At the best of times, vehicle-owners are hardly able to find a parking spot when they truly need it, which motivated husband and wife duo Pritam and Shampa Ganguly to address the problem.
PParkE’s sensor-based comprehensive smart parking solution with ‘Make in India’ sensor is specifically designed to meet the growing parking conditions in India.
“Our solution provides last mile connectivity that benefits citizen, parking administration, city authority and environment we live in. When cities employ such systems in a comprehensive manner, the most noted benefits are enhanced local GDP (statistically by 2-4%), drive smart policy and efficient enforcement. For a common man, finding parking space becomes predictable with real-time guidance to reduce the stress thereby saving of fuel, time by up to 30%,” Shampa says.
“With sensing technology, and collected parking events in PParkE machine-learning engine, the solution can help optimise parameters such as parking pricing, parking policy hours and time limitations, enforcement planning and facilitate multi-modal transportations,” she adds.
In terms of beginnings, Shampa recollects, “Perfect timing is perhaps what led to a nudge in the right direction. A good family friend, new to the city of Bengaluru ended up having his car towed away for parking in the wrong spot.”
“Had he known where he could park, perhaps he could have saved himself time and headache in a new city. Coincidently, at the same time I was on the lookout for a compelling problem for which I had to come up with a solution, as part of my course work during the MBA programme at IIM-B,” she adds.
The research and the leg work on gathering together parking data and creating solution-based algorithms paid off and today, PParkE manages India’s largest IoT-based parking data and solutions management in the country. “The initiative has mapped out 1.6 lakh parking spots across the country and 17% of the data is being managed in real time. This base is expanding,” she adds.
“Our strategy is to set up one-time parking IoT infrastructure that will last for next five years at the city-wide level at street and off-street places. Our value prop typically helps parking guys to improve efficiency and not replacing them. We are looking at building parking infrastructure and contributing towards Smart Cities. Primarily, our customer-base is B2B and till date, we have 13 global customers/partners from real estate, technology, smart city and automotive space,” she said, adding that the Smart City mission 2020 covers 100 smart cities, of which 57 need smart parking solution.
Quick facts
Founders: Shampa Ganguly and Pritam Ganguly
Into: Smart parking solutions
Number of customers: 13
Strategy: To build one-time parking IoT infrastructure