Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Streetline Gets $25M to Solve Parking

There’s just no way that helping people find and pay for parking is sexy. But it’s an industry that many people think can be helped by technology, and investors are now putting big money into their startup picks.

Streetline, a Foster City, Calif.-based company that works directly with cities to embed sensors in parking spaces, is announcing today that it has closed $25 million in Series C financing led by True Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures, on top of $15 million it raised a year ago.

There are many others in the space, including Barney Pell’s QuickPay, and BMW’s ParkNow, a $10 million project whose leaders I met with this week.

They all cite the same statistics: Parking is a $25 billion industry in the U.S., and as much as 30 percent of urban traffic congestion is due to people looking for parking. And they all have various strategies for getting apps into people’s hands and cars (Streetline’s mobile app is called Parker), and helping parking providers dynamically manage demand.

Streetline has 30 deployments at cities and universities in the U.S. and Germany. What makes it distinct from other players is this network of wireless sensors that the company deploys within cities. That gives it the added distinction of calling itself an “Internet of Things” company — definitely a sexy startup topic.

And Streetline actually doesn’t help people make mobile payments for parking itself, but instead integrates with other players in the space, like Parkmobile and PayByPhone.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald