Spot Parking, the 2026 Accelerate! winner, turned a college parking problem into a nationwide business opportunity.
By Jay Landers
Cooper Young, the chief revenue officer for the automated parking enforcement company Spot Parking, always knew he wanted to start his own business. He just didn’t know what it would be until he was living the problem. As students at Brigham Young University (BYU), Young and his co-founders, CEO Ryan Hagerty and CTO Dean Smith, had stumbled onto a telling insight: Parking enforcement was easy to beat, and the consequences were rare enough that many students simply did not bother buying permits. That observation became the seed of Spot Parking, and earlier this year Young took the stage at the Parking Industry Expo (PIE) and won the 2026 Accelerate! Parking Pitch Competition.
From permit dodgers to problem solvers
At BYU, a parking permit cost $60, the same price as a citation, Young explained. “It was a lot more fun just parking illegally and not getting caught,” he said. “We got pretty good at knowing where the enforcement people would be patrolling and where they wouldn’t be, what times of day you could park at different parking lots, different spaces.”
Young and his co-founders recognized that the behavior was not unique to their university. “I think that’s not just a BYU-specific thing,” he said. “I think that’s a nationwide occurrence for most students. They don’t buy a parking permit because no one’s going to catch them.”
Better enforcement, they concluded, would restore the incentive to buy one. “If I know I’m actually going to find a parking spot, I’ll buy a permit,” Young said. “That’s the system and that’s how it works.” Young, Hagerty, and Smith founded Spot Parking in September 2023. “We joke we weren’t the favorites at parties being parking enforcement enthusiasts at a college,” Young said. “However, we realized that we’re more passionate about solving problems and that’s why we got into entrepreneurship.”
Building on a foundation of listening
None of the three founders had any background in parking. Young is studying finance; Hagerty and Smith are the technical engine of the company, with Smith programming since childhood and Hagerty teaching himself front-end development while on a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
To validate their idea, the team spent four to five months contacting hundreds of university parking directors and security directors. “We were very surprised people were happy to hop on a Zoom call with us for 30 minutes and tell us about their problems,” Young said. Being students proved to be an asset. “You can walk into any university and say, ‘Hey, I’m a college student. I’d love to pick your brain,’ and they’ll sit down with you,” he said. “You would never be able to do that as a random sales rep walking into a university.”
BYU granted the team access to its existing security cameras to train their artificial intelligence (AI) models. This training was for educational purposes only and not commercial, Young said. The arrangement “was a fantastic opportunity,” he noted, because “we wouldn’t honestly have gotten if we weren’t university students.”
The technology: fixed LPR and a digital twin
Spot Parking’s core innovation is AI-powered software that overlays a facility’s existing cameras, license plate recognition (LPR) and standard surveillance alike, to track every vehicle entering and exiting a lot, identifying where each is parked, how long it has been there, and whether it belongs. The contrast with mobile LPR patrols is stark. “There are still people wandering around parking lots trying to find violators,” Young said. “It’s quite inefficient. They’re spending a hundred thousand dollars on the manpower of people wandering.”
With Spot Parking’s system, “we know exactly where all the violators are twenty-four seven,” Young said. The company’s patented software is camera-agnostic. “If a security camera can tell a blob is a car, that’s good enough for our system to work,” Young joked. It handles complex, multi-permit environments; Young cited a 10,000-space airport lot and a nine-deck parking garage as examples.
A wayfinding component called the digital twin creates a real-time facility map accessible through the Spot Parking app, a client’s existing app or website, or a QR code at the lot. “I can be at my house in my bedroom and I can say, ‘That parking lot or that parking garage is full. I’m not even going to drive there,’” Young said. Enforcement personnel use a separate internal application, SpotWatch, which identifies violators by license plate, make, model, and color, enabling physical citations or automated delivery via mail, email, or SMS.
A platform built for the whole operation
What started as a university-focused enforcement tool has grown into a broader platform. After conversations with private sector operators, some managing as many as seven separate parking vendors, Spot Parking expanded to include permit management, appeals processing, and a scan-to-pay solution for hourly parking.
“How is there not one company that can actually provide all these services?” Young said. “We realized it’s actually not that hard when we have dedicated, motivated engineers going at it for weeks or months at a time.” The camera-based system also delivers deep analytics, with AI-generated insights that go beyond raw numbers. “If I just have information and numbers, that doesn’t tell me much,” he said. “I want the reason why things happened.”
Today, the company serves universities, private operators, hotels, and apartment complexes, primarily in Utah, with plans to expand into the South and East Coast. Based in Lehi, Utah, Spot Parking has 10 full-time employees, one part-time employee, and four interns.
No stranger to the winner’s circle
Accelerate! was far from Spot Parking’s first pitch competition. Before bringing on investors, the team funded the company through competitions, entering dozens across Utah and nationwide. “Our claim to fame is we don’t lose pitch competitions,” Young said. Among their victories were the Student Innovator of the Year competition at BYU and the Utah Entrepreneur Challenge.
Young entered Accelerate! with confidence born from experience, structuring his pitch to invite the judges’ questions. “I was prepared for almost every single question that the judges asked me because I knew that was the information I hadn’t mentioned,” he said. He was still pleased to win. “Of course, I was surprised. I was happy to win. I think I had good competitors.” Had he not won, he “would’ve been very happy for” his competitors, he said.
What he valued most was the conversation that followed with the pitch competition judges. “Hearing their feedback, both positive and negative, helped me grow,” Young said.
Eyes on what’s next
Young is direct about where Spot Parking fits in a market dominated by large, established players. Existing university parking enforcement systems, he said, “were good when they came out, but it’s been the same for about a decade and things need to innovate, things need to change.”
Spot Parking found its opening in that gap and is now pushing further into the private sector while preparing to target the longer-cycle municipal and airport markets, with three founders who have no intention of slowing down.
JAY LANDERS is the editor-in-chief of Parking Today. He can be reached at [email protected].
