Parking and traffic regulation are about to get smarter, thanks to the IoT era.
The parking solution company AIpark (爱泊车) has completed a series C funding round of CNY 300 million (USD 42 million) led by Gaorong Capital and jointly invested by Changshang Kunzhong (长商昆仲, a fund under Shoutaijinxin Fund) and Zhongguancun Science City Science and Technology Fund (中关村科学城科创基金).
The company was founded in 2015 in Shijiazhuang, inside the Jing-Jin-Ji Metropolitan Region. The key product of AIpark is AIPARK City, a smart parking solution built on AI tech, IoT tech and data processing. The solution has been adopted in major cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and so on. In October 2019, AIpark closed a Series B+ financing of hundreds of millions of yuan, led by CCIG (中金资本).
Comparing to the traditional way of regulating parking, the IoT-featured parking solution asks for fewer on-site traffic officers by using camera and center computing to monitor the real-time parking. Cameras send back data to build a real-time traffic network and the solution will process data and help traffic regulation departments reduce traffic congestion, assist parking management and automate case processing.
‘Smart transportation’ is significant to ‘Smart City’ construction as the digital traffic regulation improves efficiency and meets the demand of parking, especially in metropolitan cities, to some extent. The State Council of the PRC has issued a document to emphasize the construction of ‘Smart Transportation’ supported by IoT, AI, blockchain, supercomputing and other technologies.
With favored policies and the low penetration of ‘Smart Parking’ among China’s alpha cities – only ~35% in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen – the market is a scaling up fast.