Luxe to end door-to-door valet service, will launch ‘new service’ this summer

Luxe started as a company that promised to make parking in busy cities less awful with an app that summoned blue-jacketed, scooter-carrying valets to your location to whisk away your car until you needed it back. It seems they’re pivoting away from that initial vision.

Users began receiving emails this afternoon like the one below, promising “a new service” by summer of this year:

We started Luxe four years ago to tackle the problem of scarce parking in urban centers — while also helping to build the city of the future. Along the way, we’ve saved our customers countless hours and we’re very grateful to have helped you reclaim some of your valuable time to focus on the important things in life while we took care of your car.

Today, we have a couple pieces of news to announce. We are launching a new service in the Summer of 2017 that makes finding parking and servicing your vehicle even easier. We will tell you more when the launch date nears. Stay tuned! However, as a result, we will no longer be continuing our door-to-door valet service in San Francisco after Thursday May 25, 2017.

If you’d rather cancel before 5/25, please let us know subscriptions@luxe.com and we will refund you for any unused days on your current billing cycle.

Thank you again for being an invaluable Luxe user. We’ve look forward to serving you once again in a few short months.

We’ve reached out to Luxe for comment, but the company had not responded at the time of publishing.

Update: Curtis Lee, the CEO of Luxe, just confirmed the change on Twitter, saying that the company has “plenty of cash” but is “changing direction”

The company has raised more than $75 million to date, according to Crunchbase, with its most recent round coming in at $50 million in April of 2016.

Update #2: Lee also confirmed to me that Luxe is ending its valet service in all cities in which it’s currently operating, not just San Francisco. He also says that the new service will be “different” from the Luxe-branded parking garages they announced in March, but “along the same vein.”