With a couple of large recent engagements, parking technology company Japa Inc. has nearly doubled the number of parking sensors it has deployed since starting up.
Japa was founded in 2017 by then-students at the University of California Davis. It started installing its parking intelligence hardware and software commercially in 2019.
Both of the new applications, one at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento and the other in downtown Vacaville, are meant to "improve the consumer experience and to get to vacant spaces quicker," said Mathew Magno, Japa co-founder and CEO.
Japa has installed 1,500 of its sensors at UC Davis Medical Center on that campus's surface lots. The company is still in negotiations to install 3,500 more sensors at the hospital's parking garages.
In Vacaville, Japa has delivered 1,200 sensors to help people find parking near the merchants in the city's downtown.
Those 2,700 new sensors are nearly half of the total of about 6,000 the company has deployed. Magno said the company is in talks with clients that could double the total again. Japa has six employees and an intern. It had revenue of $1.3 million in 2022, Magno said.
Vacaville has 853 parking spaces through 13 public parking lots in its downtown, along with several hundred on-street parking spots.
Yet the city for years has been under pressure by merchants to build a multimillion-dollar parking structure to serve the perceived lack of parking.
Using the sensors and Japa's app, the city will be able to steer people to available parking spots, Magno said.
Like a similar deployment done in Woodland in 2021, the Japa system isn't being deployed to increase payments, fees, tickets or fines, but rather to make available parking accessible more efficiently, Magno said.
Japa's sensors can be deployed on a large scale to isolate open spaces, and they can be used in limited quantities to count cars.
The sensors can be used in each parking stall to show via the app whether it is vacant or occupied. That helps drivers find vacant spaces more efficiently. In other applications, the Japa pucks can be used at the entrance and exits to parking areas, and they can count the number of cars that are in the parking area, allowing operators to know when all the parking is full and then when new parking spaces become available. That's what Japa does with SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. Just a handful of sensors at the entrances and exits monitor the 6,000 parking spaces at the stadium.
Magno said the company is now working with universities in Florida and upstate New York for their parking intelligence. The New York engagement presents some new issues for Japa, namely mounting the sensor pucks so they don't get scraped off by snow plows, he said.
Japa has won first-place prizes at both the UC Davis Big Bang! Business Competition and the Sacramento Kings Capitalize contest.
Japa was also the winner on Aug. 30 of 10 finalists selected from the Sacramento regional pitch competition for the Startup World Cup. Japa went on to be in the top 10 of that competition in San Jose in October against global companies. It was the only California company to make it to the top 10.
In 2020, Japa installed 2,000 of its parking sensors at the University of California Berkeley. It has since gone on to install its technology on the main campus of University of California Davis and at University of California Santa Barbara and California State Polytechnic University Pomona.
