MEET OUR CODE_N CONTEST FINALISTS 2018: AIPARK from Germany

One thing is for sure – you will never have to worry about parking ever again with AIPARK, your automated ‘parking buddy’. The platform is a driving change in the automotive and parking industry aiming to extend existing travel services. Co-founder Johannes Riedel reveals to us how they plan to upgrade the entire car experience in our interview.

Jessica: What is AIPARK all about?

Johannes: AIPARK minimizes the time needed to find a parking space with predictive and real-time availability information for millions of parking options. The patent-pending platform uses AI to analyze crowdsensing data from more than 6 million connected devices and integrates thousands of data streams from cities and parking operators.

AIPARK offers accurate data to realize dynamic last-mile navigation to open parking spots. It is targeted at key players in the automotive and parking industry. The platform has been set up to extend existing travel services on all internet-enabled platforms, bringing together connected cars, apps, and traffic management systems.

Jessica: How did you come up with the idea?

Johannes: Having worked in big companies – at Volkswagen, MAN Truck & Bus, and Siemens – before founding AIPARK, all of us lived in cities and commuted back and forth. We wasted a lot of time trying to find a parking spot every day. So we decided to find a solution, mainly for ourselves at first, but later we realized that the technology can solve parking issues on a much broader scale.

Driving modern cars is already a thoroughly optimized experience and it is heavily supported by technology. But every driver still faces one major problem at the end of the journey and is familiar with the annoyance associated with parking. The good news: That is about to change.

Jessica: What are you trying to solve?

Johannes: Finding a parking space is the last pain point in the entire car driving experience and causes roughly 30% of all city traffic. That’s a crazy waste of time and resources! Every time a car is moved, drivers spend in average 20 minutes driving around trying to find a space. This not only leads to significant air pollution, in Germany alone parking also wastes over 500 million hours every year.

Jessica:  AIPARK is the leading source of AI-based parking data in Germany. Do you have plans for expanding to other countries? Are you thinking of adding further features or functions to your service (such as remembering where the car was parked, driver alerts when a ticket is about to expire, or navigation help to get the driver to the nearest gas station)?

Johannes: AIPARK already helps drivers by predicting the probability of finding a parking space in more than 140 cities. Additionally, the system can track when street parking spaces are about to open up and suggests these in real-time to drivers in the area. This feature is based on the combined analysis of raw data feeds from crowdsensing, IoT sensors, and computer vision (about 500k times per day!). Drivers can use our free Android and iOS apps to navigate on the whole journey, from the very start directly to the open parking spot.

Over the next 18 months, we’ll be working on integrating further data sources to provide the best-in-market parking information, not only in Germany but also nationwide in all the top ten countries in Europe. The system will cover on-street parking, parking lots, underground parking, etc. One of our next milestones is the integration of connected vehicle sensors as a data source to leverage the value of parking suggestions and to move more and more toward knowing where to park at any destination.

Jessica: Thank you for the interview, Johannes!

Meet AIPARK at the new.New Festival 2018this fall, in Stuttgart!