China’s AIpark closes $15m Series A

Banyan Capital also participated. The capital will support R&D aimed at improving market share through new smart technologies, products and services. This effort will include an expansion into overseas markets.

"The first and foremost challenge facing the creation of green smart cities is traffic congestion, environmental degradation, and high-energy consumption,” US-China Green Fund CEO Bo Bai said in a statement. “AIpark is the world's first company that has commercially applied fully intelligent image recognition technology to address the main challenges of urban development. The company has already taken several major Chinese cities and become an industry leader."

Founded in 2015, AIpark offers a number of intelligent parking management services under names such as AIpark City and AIpark One with a view to addressing congestion and carpark shortage issues. It is currently developing a system that will combine scenario recognition technologies and supercomputing to achieve fully autonomous management and monitoring of parking facilities.

The company claims that AIpark City has doubled its revenue since being implemented in Beijing, Shijiazhuang and Handan. Meanwhile, AIpark One is said to have increased revenue by 50% and reduced operating costs by 60%. AIpark One services more than one thousand parking lots across Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Shijiazhuang, Handan, Zhangjiakou, Xi’an, and Jinan.

Parking availability in China is said to be only one-third of that in the developed world, equating to less than a half a bay per car. At the same time, a lack of communication between garage operators and drivers has led to low utilization rates for existing parking spaces. Recent activity in this segment includes a RMB1.5 billion round led by Warburg Pincus for Sunsea Parking.

Growing investor interest in the digitization of conventional automobile services in China has been supported by rapid expansion of the domestic market as well as political pressure to curb environmental impacts. Estimates for the number of cars on Chinese roads are beginning to top 300 million. Meanwhile, poor urban planning and ineffective regulatory interventions are seen as creating an opportunity for traffic optimization through technology.

The US-China Green Fund was established last year by China’s Office of the Central Leading Group for Financial & Economic Affairs and the Paulson Institute of the US. Activity to date includes a $116 million commitment to smart home developer Hosjoy and participation in a joint venture that will invest up to RMB80 billion in underperforming Chinese steel assets. 

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Support services
• Technology
• Cleantech
• Early-stage
• China
• Banyan Capital
• automobiles