A curbside is being squeezed becoming number of commercial vehicle operators and gig economy workers battle over this progressively scarce real estate — a complaint that has been compounded by any kind of uptick in on-demand shipments services fueled by the pandemic.
A number of start ups such as Coord and curbflow have popped up in recent years, all aiming to solve regarding supply and demand matter. One entrant, the three-year-old startup Automotus , is beginning to rack up deployments in zones within cities like Santa Monica, Pittsburgh, Bellevue, Washington and Turin, Italy. A project in Los Angeles is also in the works.
Investors have taken notice as well. The company, which developed video analytics technology to monitor and manage curbsides for cities, said in February it had raised $1.2 million in a seed round led by Quake Capital, Techstars Ventures, Kevin Uhlenhaker (the co-founder & CEO at NuPark, which was acquired by Passport) and Baron Davis. CEO Jordan Justus told TechCrunch the company’s total raise is now $2.3 million. New investors include Ben Bear, Derrick Ko, and Zaizhuang Cheng of micromobility company Spin.
The startup is still small, with just 11 full-time employees. However, Justus said the newly raised funds are being used to expand into new markets and to hire more employees.
Automotus uses computer vision technology to capture video of parking zones — places that might be designated for only zero-emissions vehicles or commercial deliveries. Their software handles a variety of functions, including analysis and enforcement. Cities are able to access analytics through a web app. Commercial fleets are able to access information about parking zones via open APIs and in some cases a mobile app, according to Justus.
Image Credits: Automotus
For instance, one introduced announced pilot project complete with Santa Monica and Idaho Cleantech Incubator will supervise a one-square-mile zero-emissions dosage zone in the city. Automotus will provide anonymized data meant for evaluating the zone’s strikes on delivery efficiency, safe practice, congestion and emissions, and we intend to make real-time parking provision data available to all zero-emissions delivery zone drivers.
The startup, which has been founded in late 2017 and certainly is a Techstars alum, helps make its money primarily throughout revenue sharing on it really is enforcement feature. Automotus arrives a slice of the price commercial customers are routinely charged when parking within specific zones, as well as alliance fees on parking wrong doing. While the analytics might help towns, cities set policy or determine pick-up and drop-off groupe, it’s the enforcement supply that Justus says delivers biggest opportunity.
Loyola Marymount University from Los Angeles used Automotus’ technician to fully automate parking enforcement. Automotus said enforcement capability and revenue increased simply more than 500%, and added an additional that implementing these ways led to a 24% upsurge in parking turnover and a even just the teens reduction in traffic.
“The enforcement a part is really critical to the navy operators because they need to know how the zones are managed easily and managed well to ensure that they’re available for commercial use, in that’s what they’re pertaining to, ” he said.
