Parkaze — Community powered parking

Boston-based Parkaze has created a hassle-free parking and navigation platform in an effort to solve parking challenges in major cities.

Problem

According to the INRIX, Americans waste a total of 73 billion dollars, 1.3 billion gallons of gas, and 3.6 billion hours while searching for parking every year. Adding insult to injury, 30% of the parking spots in cities are privately owned by residents and are left vacant for the majority of the day.

What The Company Does

Parkaze’s mission is to streamline the whole parking experience by making it easy, affordable and sustainable. The team is leveraging their idea to economically empower people around the world to unlock and monetize their spaces in order to provide a smarter alternative to people looking for spaces to park. The system is simple: hosts post their privately owned parking spot on the app and set the availability, price​ ​and rules. Drivers are then able to search the app for available spots in any area,​ ultimately leading to cheaper and safer alternatives to traditional parking.

Traction

Parkaze participated in BostonHacks 2018 and won 3 prizes — the BU Spark! Fellowship, “Best Use of Authorize.net API” and “Best Social Hack” by Fidelity. Recently, the team was added into the BU Innovation pathway and were selected for the summer 2019 cohort for Elevate: Growth Accelerator by HubSpot and General Catalyst and 2019 the Fall 2019 cohort for Tech Wildcatters. The team is currently building partnerships at Boston University through the entrepreneurship cell in order to launch our product for the Boston ecosystem. They plan on releasing a pilot study for their application later in Fall 2019, targeting data collection and response from people from BU (mostly professors, alumni, students in fraternity houses).

Founding Team Background

Parkaze is led by CEO Amal Radhakrishnan, CTO Ashwin Pillai, CCO Oindrilla Chatterjee and founding member Guanhua Lee. The Parkaze team hails from 4 different countries and 3 different Boston University schools and prides themselves in creating a diverse and inclusive culture where everybody has a voice.

What They Need Help With

The team is always looking for curious and passionate people who would like to make a positive impact through the problems that they are trying to solve. If interested, please reach out to The Buzz at hello@ourbuzzmedia.com or fill out a contact form at https://www.parkaze.com/pages/contact.

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