It's been a busy summer for SpotHero.
The parking startup outfitted 500 Chicago parking facilities with new driverless car-enabled technology, announced a partnership with Waze to install bluetooth beacons on Lower Wacker Drive to improve cellphone signals, and is in talks with electric scooter companies to potentially use SpotHero garages as places to park e-scooters when not in use.
That news follows other big partnerships SpotHero announced this calendar year, including deals with Hertz and Google Assistant.
And CEO Mark Lawrence says more partnership announcements are on the way. So to help keep its foot on the gas, the Chicago startup raised some new funding.
This week SpotHero raised an additional $10 million in funding, bringing its total amount raised to $68 million since it launched in 2011. Lawrence said the round was backed by existing investors, though he declined to name the specific backers.
"We didn’t need to do this now, but we’ve been ahead on our growth targets," he said. "And in addition to being ahead on our growth and spending less money doing it, we had a number of partnerships that have come to fruition sooner than we had anticipated, which accelerated our need to make investments in technology."
Lawrence called it an "opportunistic top-up round" in between plans to raise another round in 2019.
"It was a nice step up in valuation from the last round," he said.
Lawrence said the company plans to make more partnerships announcements soon around the "broader mobility sector."
SpotHero is one of Chicago's most promising startups. The company employs more than 200 people and says it has helped park more than 20 million cars to date.
