Dallas-based ParkHub continues to find new markets for its parking management technology with a deal to buy a California-based company that works with commercial property owners.
Smarking, founded in 2014 by Wen Sang and Maokai Lin, is used in more than 2,500 locations by commercial real estate owners, municipalities, hospitals, universities, airports and parking operators in North America.
George Baker, CEO and founder of ParkHub, said he had known Sang for years and had seen Smarking’s business grow. The San Francisco-based company specializes in working with transaction-level data to turn it into real-time business intelligence.
“We’ve both always had an aligned vision for how the future state of parking will work,” Baker said. The Dallas Morning News tuesday.
Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. ParkHub entered the acquisition after raising nearly $120 million from investors. Smarking raised $3 million in seed funding in 2015, according to Crunchbase tracking site.
Smarking SmartPass parking reservation technology is used in office buildings such as Oakland City Center in the Bay Area, Indeed Tower in Austin and Cathedral Plaza in Cleveland. He also helped the Miami Parking Authority replace street meters with mobile payment.
Baker said entering the commercial office market makes business intelligence even more important because of the tenant and visitor base and parking turnover. Three to five years ago, parking operators didn’t have the technology that ParkHub built.
“You couldn’t understand those turnover rates in real time because you had to count tickets,” Baker said. “You must have waited for the report.”
Smarking’s Sang said the two companies share a vision of a “software-driven ecosystem that increases revenue and drives savings.”
“We see this as an opportunity to join forces and really take it to the next level, to accelerate and accelerate this progress, to help digitize the entire parking world,” said Sang, who had Smarking’s idea. while struggling to find parking in Boston during his doctoral days at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Smarking will continue to run its business until the end of the year with Sang as CEO. Sang and Lin will hold positions on ParkHub’s leadership team and All 22 Smarking employees will join ParkHub.
ParkHub was founded in 2010 by Baker, a Dallas native who grew up in a family of parking operators. His father co-founded Parking Company of America-Dallas. Prior to this deal, Baker said ParkHub had about 800 to 1,000 locations, working with a variety of professional sports teams and Super Bowl organizers.
Earlier this month, ParkHub, known locally for its parking technology at the American Airlines Center and AT&T Stadium, announced a new partnership with Los Angeles-based Oak View Group to expand its footprint across the country. Oak View Group owns and operates arenas such as the homes of the NHL’s Seattle Kraken and New York Islanders, as well as the Moody Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
In February, ParkHub has received a growth investment of approximately $100 million from private equity firm LLR Partners. The company planned to use the capital to further develop its parking management and payment processing technology, as well as potential acquisitions. In 2021, the company acquired Dallas-based startup Bonfire to venture into running campgrounds with its technology.