AirGarage Raises $23M Series B |
We’re excited to share that AirGarage has raised a $23 million Series B led by Headline Growth with participation from our existing investors and customers.
AirGarage replaces clunky parking machines, fragmented software, and manual, labor-intensive operations with a unified, data-rich operating system for parking real estate. We handle everything it takes to run and optimize a parking asset: payments, dynamic pricing, enforcement, license plate recognition, analytics, and more.
By building all of our technology in-house, we are able to deliver a magical experience for drivers while providing real-time visibility and revenue increases of 20-50% or more for real estate owners. That’s why national real‑estate leaders like Hines and Greystar, as well as technology companies like Meta, partner with AirGarage to optimize their parking facilities.
AirGarage has grown over 10x since our Series A to now manage 300+ parking facilities in 38 states across the US. AirGarage is cash flow positive, generating more annualized revenue today than the total capital burned in the lifetime of the business. Our fundamentals are strong, with 234% net revenue retention at 24 months, because once owners see what modern parking asset management looks like, they want us to take over all of their properties.
This milestone marks the beginning of the next chapter in our mission to bring real estate online.
If you’ve ever circled the block looking for parking, you know the feeling. The mix of frustration and resignation as you pass the same confusing signs for the third time. The ancient machine that swallows your ticket. The app that somehow makes things worse than the coin-operated meter it replaced.
You might think parking is this way because property owners want it to be complicated. The reality is they hate it too. They’re bleeding money on broken hardware and manual operations while having zero visibility into what’s actually happening at their property.
Meanwhile, parking is massively overbuilt in our cities: there are 8 parking spaces for every car in the United States and 26% of land area in the average American urban core is dedicated to parking. All of it offline and underutilized.
AirGarage is changing that.
You might be wondering: if real estate owners hate how their parking is run and drivers hate the parking experience... why is it done this way?
At the most basic level, owners hire parking operators that are 50-100 years old and haven’t evolved since the 1980s to run their parking facilities. These firms are glorified staffing companies that rely on gate arms, attendants, and cash.
It turns out that these traditional parking operators have a fundamental business model misalignment with owners: they don’t invest in technology to automate operations because they make money by passing through their operating costs to real estate owners, usually with a markup.
This means the more manual their operations, the more labor hours they can justify, the more revenue they generate.
Naturally, entrepreneurs took notice of the lagging parking industry and thought, “I can fix this with software.”
They built apps for mobile payments or marketplaces to aggregate parking locations in every city. These products failed to fundamentally change the industry because they were just thin veneers of digitization slapped on top of the traditional parking operators that controlled the locations without meaningfully automating the deeper operational layers that truly matter.
The result? Parking got more complicated, not easier. Traditional parking operators use an app from one vendor, a machine from a different vendor, and cameras from yet another vendor and then stitch them all together as a non-technology company. The net result is they have no unified source of truth about what is really happening in the properties they manage.
We took the opposite approach. We built AirGarage to be the antidote at every level: one vertically integrated stack, one source of truth, and incentives that align with owners.
Scott, Chelsea, and I started AirGarage in 2017 to solve our own problem: finding parking at Arizona State University. We built a peer-to-peer marketplace that enabled homeowners to rent out their driveways to students.
We soon discovered a bigger opportunity to impact the problem in underutilized parking lots at churches and small businesses. They had parking lots sitting empty and locked off from public use while people couldn’t find a place to park.
We worked with those initial partners to solve from first principles how a parking facility should be operated in the modern age. We rethought everything:
The operating system we built in partnership with those first owners became the foundation for everything we do at AirGarage today.
We didn’t know it at the time, but institutional real estate owners were dealing with the same fundamental issues in their parking properties.
The industry was already broken but COVID cast an even harsher spotlight on it. Traditional parking operators were stuck in the past, slow to adopt technology and adjust to new usage patterns. They couldn’t even provide basic data about what was happening at the properties they had been trusted to manage.
That’s when institutional real estate owners started calling AirGarage.
We had been building exactly what they were looking for: a modern partner for parking management that uses technology to automate the day-to-day of operations and eliminate costs while collecting a treasure trove of data that enables real-time dynamic pricing, load-balancing across marketing channels, and more to maximize revenue.
We took the hard path of going full-stack because it’s the only one that leads to a fundamentally different outcome. Duct-taped point solutions can’t get you there. You need to own the full operating system.
Everything clicked as we pivoted from opening up underutilized lots to managing flagship assets for institutional real estate owners. We grew 12x that year to raise our Series A and went all in on building the next generation real estate asset management firm.
But real estate owners don’t just want data. They want a strategic partner that will proactively find ways to optimize their asset, not just react when something breaks.
They want an asset manager, not just a property manager.
The critical ingredient to being an effective asset manager is data. That is why AirGarage’s vertically integrated operating system is a game changer for the owners that we partner with.
Owners are learning for the first time what days of the week are busiest or what driver sentiment is in their properties; these are basic datapoints that are a pre-requisite to asset optimization.
Effective real estate asset management boils down to looking at data to figure out what levers you can pull to increase revenue or decrease costs. The more data you have, the better decisions you can make.
AirGarage uses datapoints like real-time occupancy, local events, weather, driver behavior, competitor pricing, and more to bring true intelligence to real estate owners’ assets for the first time.
We’re investing aggressively to make the physical world legible to a digital system: cameras, sensors, and software that generate a firehose of real-time data about the world around us. That data fuels models and algorithms that allow us to optimize performance at each property while giving owners the clarity and control they’ve never had before.
Before you can optimize an asset, you need to observe it. Before you can observe it, you need to bring it online.
We are building the infrastructure to bring real estate into the Intelligence Age.
The last five years of building have laid the foundation for something much bigger.
What’s true of parking real estate is true of real estate broadly: it’s offline and it’s underutilized. If we do this well in parking, we earn the right to go broader.
The physical world is full of inefficiencies and better-managed real estate means better cities for all of us living in them.
If this mission resonates with you, we’re recruiting world-class talent to help us modernize one of the largest, most overlooked industries. Come build with us.
