ParkWhiz just made a big hire in the race to keep up with fellow Chicago on-demand parking startup SpotHero.
ParkWhiz announced Thursday that it has hired Dan Roarty as its president of consumer brands and marketplace. Roarty comes to ParkWhiz from Groupon, where he led the deal site's marketplaces initiative. He also held leadership positions at Orbitz and Vast.com.
Roarty will be tasked with leading ParkWhiz's consumer efforts and build on the momentum the company has seen on the B2C side of its business, CEO Aashish Dalal said, noting that Roarty has a "proven record of growing consumer brands."
"Part of what we’re excited about is his ability to fast-scale marketplace businesses like ParkWhiz," Dalal said.
Along with the news, ParkWhiz announced that Tim Brennan will transition to the role of president of platform--in other words, the B2B side of the company. ParkWhiz has partnerships with companies like Ticketmaster, which uses ParkWhiz to help people find parking at events, and Ford, which works with the company on its internet-connected dashboard.
ParkWhiz expects to see the vehicle dashboard play a big role in its business moving forward, Dalal said.
"In the future the dashboard is going to play a huge role in frictionless parking," he said. Analysts expect that 250 million cars will be internet connected by 2020.
ParkWhiz today has around 12,000 parking locations across the US, a third of which are bookable on demand. The company is up to 140 employees and says it's parked 6 million cars since it launched in 2006. ParkWhiz has raised $36 million since its founding.
Its rival SpotHero recently acquired Parking Panda, a Baltimore-based parking startup, which increased its presence on the East Coast as well as Canada. SpotHero says it has 5,000 on-demand parking locations across North America, and it has raised $27 million since launching in 2011.
