One of the best decisions I ever made was to get rid of my car. The thing that really drove me over the edge? The constant search for parking, particularly in big cities, and the parking tickets that can pile up as a result.
Israeli startup Anagog is trying to tackle that problem with real-time crowdsourced data. The company is announcing today that it’s going into beta testing and that it has raised $1 million in funding.
“This is an area that’s ready to be disrupted,” says Chief Marketing Officer Jake Levant. He described street parking as a market where there’s no visibility into supply and demand. Anagog, he said, “can redirect demand to where there is supply — there is the free market at play here.”
We’ve written about a number of parking startups, and their approaches include partnering with parking lots, offering valet service, and flat-out selling your parking spot before you vacate it (that last one doesn’t seem to be flying with the government).
Anagog’s approach is probably closer to another service that began in Israel — Waze, which was acquired by Google. (I was the one who brought up the Waze comparison to Levant, and he didn’t reject it.)
The company says that it has built up a network of “tens of millions of drivers [who] contribute millions of parking events daily.” The combination of historical and real-time data means that drivers can find areas where there’s more open parking, and even see specific spots that are being vacated.
One difference between the Waze model and Anagog, however, is that Anagog is not building an app for consumers. Instead, it’s distributing its CrowdPark technology by integrating with partners. For example, it’s announcing today that it’s partnering with Milgam Cellular Parking to bring CrowdPark into Milgam’s parking payment service Pango.
The funding, by the way, came from angel investors including Yos Shiran (CEO of Ceaserstone), Dan Vilensky (former chairman of Applied Materials Israel) and Avi Shechter, former vice president at AOL.