By Jay Landers
Looking to provide a more comprehensive approach to smart parking, the parking guidance solution provider ParkHelp Technologies has acquired Cleverciti Systems GmbH, a rival parking guidance provider specializing in curb management, on-street parking signage, and guided enforcement solutions.
Announced November 3, the deal unites ParkHelp’s off-street parking guidance expertise with the on-street capabilities of Cleverciti. Together, the two smart parking providers support more than 600,000 monitored parking spaces across more than 700 locations in 50 countries, according to a same-day news release from the companies announcing the acquisition.
Terms of the deal, which closed on October 23, were not disclosed by the privately held companies. TrueNorth Capital Partners and DLA Piper advised Cleverciti on the transaction, while Lupp+Partner advised ParkHelp.
Combining forces
Begun in Spain in 2004, ParkHelp merged in 2019 with Parking Sense, a New Zealand parking system company. Now headquartered in New Zealand, ParkHelp has regional offices in Spain, Brazil, and the United States. ParkHelp offers infrared, ultrasonic and camera-based sensors, as well as vehicle counters, license plate recognition cameras, digital guidance signs, and the ParkManager parking management platform.
Founded in 2012, Cleverciti has its headquarters in Munich, Germany, and offices in Chicago. Among its offerings, Cleverciti has overhead sensors, digital parking guidance displays, an app for guiding drivers to parking spaces, and a guided enforcement tool to direct enforcement officers to parking spaces or locations that are in violation. The company also markets the CleverPortal parking intelligence platform to facilitate the management of curb activity, revenue, and compliance.
By combining forces, the two companies can offer a fuller selection of parking guidance products and services while simplifying the process of overseeing parking programs, said Poojitha Preena, ParkHelp’s CEO. “Cleverciti brings world-class [artificial intelligence], data intelligence, and sensor technology to the ParkHelp ecosystem,” Preena said in the November 3rd release. “Together, we’re the only global provider able to manage every parking space — on-street or off-street, indoor or outdoor — from one unified, cloud-based platform.”
For Cleverciti, the deal helps the company meet its goal to “maximally scale” its impact, Parker told Parking Today in an interview conducted ahead of the November 3 announcement. ParkHelp is a “highly complementary partner” that will enable Cleverciti to “go to market at just a much bigger scale,” he said. “We go from having a footprint in 12 countries with two offices to having access to over 50 countries and hundreds of thousands of already installed spaces.”
Overcoming silos
Historically, many parking operations have operated in a siloed fashion that complicates efforts to view the big picture, Preena told Parking Today. “These silos have made it very difficult for them to get a clear understanding of the business that they’re in — the data, the analytics, the payments, the enforcement,” he said. “The more different silos you have, the harder it is to tie all these things together.”
With ParkHelp’s acquisition of Cleverciti, the combined entities will be in a better position to help clients make sense of their overall operations, Preena said. “One of the single largest values that we are going to be able to deliver to our new joint customers the fastest is the ability to get a single view on all of these things very, very quickly.”
More to come from ParkHelp
Under the arrangement, Cleverciti becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of ParkHelp, and the “entire Cleverciti team will remain in place following the acquisition, ensuring continuity for clients and partners,” according to the release.
The company also will retain the Cleverciti name, Preena told Parking Today. “Cleverciti will effectively reflect our on-street business and ParkHelp will reflect our off-street business,” he said.
The Cleverciti deal is merely the first of further planned acquisitions and partnerships on the part of ParkHelp. ““We’re just getting started,” Preena said in the release.
In addition to looking for additional technology options, ParkHelp could aim to expand into new markets through means of an acquisition, Preena told Parking Today.
Jay Landers is the editor-in-chief of Parking Today. He can be reached at [email protected].
