Careers at SpotHero
Mission
SpotHero is a mobile parking app which aims to ease the hassle of looking for a parking spot in busy cities and the risk of a parking ticket or a tow.
History
Inspired by their personal experiences with excessive parking tickets, Mark Lawrence and Jeremy Smith launched the app on May 2011 which allowed its users to search for parking spaces in their area and reserve them in a single tap. A year later, a third co-founder in the person of Larry Kiss joined Lawrence and Smith and together they launched in the program TechStars which enabled entrepreneurs to bring advanced technologies to the online market.
On December 2012, they raised a total of $2.5 million venture capital funds from Battery Ventures, 500 Startups, Bullet Time, e.Ventures, OCA Ventures, New World Ventures, Lightbank, and Draper VC and an additional $4.5 million in funding on June 2014.
In between the two rounds of funding, Spothero was said to have expanded from 5 to 22 employees and grew from 2 to 7 markets with an office in New York City. The mobile application is free and a 15% commission is taken from every parking transaction, with discounts of up to 80%.
By August 2015, they have concluded over 1 million parking reservations and have partnered with over 200 parking companies in 12 cities including Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Newark, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington and was reported to have raised another $20 million.
From the expansion, SpotHero was branded as the "biggest parking marketplace” in the DC Metro area on February 2016. Lawrence says that although their focus as of now is North America, they are looking forward to an international expansion in the future.
Among SpotHero’s leading parking operators are ABM Parking Services, Impark, LAZ Parking and the Chicago-based company Standard Parking.