Parking near the Los Angeles Coliseum is a problem.
During his junior year of college, Ethan Glass set out to solve that problem with his first-year collegiate soccer teammate, Nate Dunning.
After an initial attempt at solving the problem failed, Glass subleased a rundown apartment around the venue for $150/month with just a futon and instant ramen, which he’d subsist off for months.
Then it was time to walk the streets daily and volunteer as a valet or parking attendant for homeowners and surface lot operators in the area.
Originally, Glass and his team planned to build a consumer parking marketplace, but they quickly discovered that the unit economics were too costly to scale.
Glass was still hungry to make it work, so when the team uncovered the opportunity to arbitrage parking spots for events as day-lease operators, they pivoted and went all in.
Being parking operators opened the team’s eyes immensely.
They were experiencing firsthand the complexities involved in running a parking operation, including staffing attendants, setting rates, managing inventory, and preventing slippage.
Getting this experience, for Glass and his team, was invaluable.
Listing inventory on various consumer parking marketplaces, such as SpotHero and ParkWhiz, grew revenue significantly. But the cost of labor associated with managing the channels was a significant pain point.
Fortunately, Glass had the right team to build what was needed: internal software that centralized the management of rates and inventory across multiple channels.
They stopped burning time and labor logging into each seller console individually to do their tasks and were able to grow.
Then COVID-19 struck. Events shut down and the company’s model was shattered.
They needed to pivot, but prior to doing so, they had to learn from about the parking industry’s unique challenges from the people experiencing them.
Glass and his team built a bot to reach out on LinkedIn to 3,000 parking professionals ranging from valets to notable CEOs, all of whom welcomed conversations about their experiences during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Overwhelmingly, the team heard that the same channel fragmentation was a ubiquitous problem and the root of many of parking’s most costly operational problems.
This was the same issue that the team experienced firsthand as operators trying to manage rates, inventory, and reporting across multiple consumer marketplaces.
They decided to build out their software for multiple verticals and turn it into a SaaS platform. The first feature built was “One-Click Rate Adjustment”; for short, they called it “Ocra”.
Today, Ocra is a true agnostic partner that connects 50+ parking operators and asset owners with dozens of demand channels to deliver the highest ROI across the board.
The software is live at 600+ locations with $120mm in GMV and 2.9mm transactions projected to flow through the platform in 2024.
In 2023, Ocra launched its revenue management services division, Ocra CoPilot.
Ocra CoPilot leverages the team’s parking expertise + the real-time data from its software platform to increase NOI for hotels with no extra labor or diversions from their core business (i.e., the guest experience).
For MCR, the third-largest hotel owner-operator in North America, Ocra generated $3.4m in gross sales and $2.5m in incremental NOI at 15 of their locations in 2023, with revenues on track to double in 2024.
In March 2024, Ocra raised $3.5m in strategic capital in an oversubscribed round co-led by MCR and Parker Technology, demonstrating strong confidence in the company’s vision of building the API layer of the parking industry. Ocra has raised $5m to date.
Glass has turned down multiple acquisition offers, instead focusing on building relationships with strategic investors in parking and adjacent industries.
He seeks to help the parking industry adapt to changes that have already taken places in more tech-forward industries, such as transportation, mobility, hospitality and real estate.
The way Glass sees it, facilitating the open flow of data between technologies within parking is a prerequisite to unlocking opportunities with adjacent ones.
Glass credits much of the company’s growing success to the many industry veterans that continue to generously share their experiences and wisdom.
One may assume that parking leaders with long impressive careers won’t be interested in educating someone new to the industry, but Glass has found it to be the opposite.
He approaches these relationships with a giving mentality first.
“Our partners mean everything to us,” says Glass. “They continue to help us understand what their needs are, where they see opportunities, and how we can best collaborate to build the best solutions.”
He continues:
“Collaboration is in the Ocra DNA, and we strive to create a culture where 1 + 1 = 3 and a rising tide lifts all ships.”
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