AppyWay is a technology company which provides parking apps and services for drivers. It was founded in London in 2013 by Dan Hubert initially under the name of Yellow Line Parking. It produces software that shows on-street and off-street parking options in major cities in the UK. The app is available on both Android and iOS. There is also a paid-for enterprise app, AppyParking Pro, which is a software as a service aimed at businesses with fleets.
History
AppyParking was founded by Dan Hubert, a former advertising creative in 2012. Hubert started to contact every London borough and digitize their Controlled Parking Zones from basic PDF maps. Originally named Yellow Line Parking, dealing only with single yellow line parking restrictions, the company was expanded and rebranded as AppyParking in 2014. In late 2014, the company was part of the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator programme in London, during which Eric Requena, the company's chief technology officer, was advised to revise much of the application code. In December 2014, AppyParking launched an enterprise app aimed at commercial fleets, and at the CES 2015 in January 2015 Ford announced a partnership with the company. Later in the year, the company ran a one-month trial in Westminster, London with Vodafone xone and Pimlico Plumbers. When a driver located a parking space with the help of the app, they clicked a button in the app when they arrived and simply drove away later, being billed only for the time they were parked. This was made possible by the sensors already built into parking bays. Since January 2016, AppyParking provides a feature which shows the nearest and cheapest petrol stations anywhere in the UK. In September 2016, founder Dan Hubert appeared on BBC business show Dragon's Den seeking investment to expand the service, valuing the company at £10m based on a 2% equity offered for a sum of £200,000. He was unsuccessful after declining two offers from Peter Jones and Nick Jenkins, who instead valued the company at £1m. In January 2019 AppyParking launched the world’s first integrated Smart City Parking solution in the North Yorkshire town of Harrogate. The solution combines technical capabilities such as smart parking sensors, automatic number plate recognition barriers and sensor-enabled payments into a consolidated system, offering a seamless experience for users across both on and off-street parking and a powerful kerbside utilisation tool for local authorities. In June 2019 AppyParking launched Mapper, their traffic regulation order management solution, a major piece of the puzzle for local governments to manage their kerbside. In the UK, traffic orders are legal documents drafted and made by the council which regulate the use of highways for movement and parking and also off street parking areas within the borough by drivers of vehicles and/or pedestrians. Mapper was designed in partnership with InnovateUK and three local authorities. It is a highly intuitive tool that provides fully standardised data formats with an output available via API. In July 2019 AppyParking closed a Series A round of investment worth £7.6m from investors including Hyundai Motor Company and Sumitomo Corporation. The company has raised a total of £11m as of 2019 and is now valued at £50m after its 2019 round. As of 2019, AppyParking hosts the largest dataset of the UK's kerbside restrictions, with over 450 UK towns and cities mapped within the AppyParking mobile app and Kerbside API. AppyParking rebranded as AppyWay in September 2019. AppyWay launched its second Smart City Parking scheme in the town of Halifax in October 2019.
Awards
AppyWay's solutions have won several industry awards and accolades, most recently taking home two British Parking Awards 2020. AppyWay won the Intelligent Parking award for the world-leading Smart City Parking scheme in Harrogate. The scheme is benefiting residents and visitors in Harrogate through real-time availability and seamless pay-as-you-go payments via the AppyParking mobile app. For the two local authority stakeholders, the system provides them with complete visibility over their kerbside via an analytics dashboard. The second award, the Parking Partnerships award, went to Future Ready Traffic Orders by the AppyWay solution Mapper. Mapper is the cloud-based, traffic order management solution a local authority needs to digitally manage traffic orders and provide open access to standardised kerbside data. Future Ready Traffic Orders by Mapper was created in partnership with Cambridgeshire County Council, Coventry City Council and Milton Keynes Council.
Technology
AppyWay uses Google Maps overlays to display areas, and projects its dataset in the form of pins. The app retrieves the user's location and the present date and time to provide a list of prices, and connects with routing apps like Maps and Waze to direct the user to the parking site.
