With its computer vision-powered parking solutions, Munich’s Parkdepot raises a fresh €15 million

After pulling down €4.2 million in a seed round back in March of 2021, Munich’s parking specialists Parkdepot is keeping the transmission in drive with a €15 million Series A round. The capital is aimed at driving international expansion efforts as well as continued product development.

The €15 million Series A round was provided by Surplus Equity Partners, Armira Growth, and existing investor henQ.

Not a topic one thinks about on a daily basis, but Europe’s current parking lot market is fragmented between a few traditional management companies and upstart parking technology companies. Parkdepot is taking a different approach to managing where your ride is parked and stored by combining elements from each sector and innovating with image recognition technologies combined with an AI element, as opposed to traditional methods which involve barriers, ground sensors, and on-site staff.

Parkdepot is fully digitising parking lots and reducing costs associated with the automated process, mainly through the elimination of on-site staff and no expensive hardware required to get set up. The system uses a camera to scan cars that enter and exit parking spaces, and offers operators usage analytics of available parking space, identifying unused capacities that can then be made available for rent, thereby upping the overall commercial value of the space.

According to the company, their GDPR-compliant and DEKRA-certified solution is processing more than 1 million parking transactions every day and employs around 200 people in six countries.

After taking the DACH region by storm in 2021, Parkdepot expanded to Poland, Denmark, and Italy this year, and now claims to manage almost a third of its parking spaces in international markets.

“We are currently observing a massive trend towards camera-based parking technology and are convinced that in five to ten years the majority of all European parking areas will be managed digitally,” said Parkdepot co-founder and co-CEO Jakob Bodenmüller. “At Parkdepot we are developing a uniform operating system for parking lots that will automatically cover all aspects of security, payment, and data analysis using computer vision technologies and AI in the future.”