Parking near the Los Angeles Coliseum is a problem.
In 2018, while he was a freshman at Occidental College, Nate Dunning and his soccer teammate Ethan Glass founded a business to solve it.
The original plan was to build a consumer parking marketplace, similar to SpotHero and ParkWhiz, that customers could use to find and reserve parking near the venue.
This would effectively reduce congestion caused by cars circling the block looking for a parking while generating revenue for homeowners and parking operators in the area.
But it didn’t take long for Dunning and Glass to discover that the unit economics were too costly to scale and competing with massive consumer parking marketplaces was not in the company’s future.
Still highly motivated to grow the business, the founders went back to the drawing board.
If building a consumer demand channels wasn’t the right niche, could the company instead leverage those channels to drive revenue for parking assets that they managed?
They pivoted to new model of arbitraging parking spots for events as day-lease operators.
As operators, Dunning and his team used as many consumer demand channels as possible to drive revenue and optimize yield of parking assets.
But it didn’t take too long before Dunning, sitting at the helm of the young company’s operations, could no longer ignore the inefficiencies.
His team was logging in to multiple seller consoles every day to set and manage rates and inventory on a per-channel basis.
This resulted in oversold spaces, missed revenue opportunities, and disparate reports that needed to be manually reconciled.
To increase margins and scale the operation, Dunning identified the need for reliable software to make multi-channel management more efficient, prevent slippage and misuse, and save hours of employee training, which the team’s talented engineers were able to build.
Then COVID-19 hit. Events shut down and the company’s business model shattered.
This was the company’s next inflection point: do they give up, or they see if the centralized demand channel management tool that they built for themselves has meaningful applications for other parking operators?
Dunning decided to find out. The next step was assessing product market fit.
It wasn’t enough just to experience the problem of technological fragmentation on their own; they needed to validate it.
The team went about doing this by building a bot to message more than 3,000 parking leaders on LinkedIn to ask if they were open to talking about their experiences during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Other than nobody driving, what business challenges were they facing? And how do they plan to implement new technologies moving forward?
The overwhelming response from the industry was that the same channel fragmentation that Dunning and his team experienced as operators was a ubiquitous problem and the root of many of parking’s most costly operational problems.
If you look at the company’s early product roadmap, you can see the impact that these conversations made on how they determined the critical capabilities of the platform.
The team prioritized what they built, and informed how they built it, based on these insights.
The outcome was another pivot: turning that internal software into a SaaS platform for multiple verticals. The name comes from the first feature completed: “One-Click Rate Adjustment” or, as they called it internally, “Ocra”.
Two years passed before Dunning and his team released Ocra Version 2.0 in August 2022.
They spent that period building out a robust minimum viable product in collaboration with the software’s early adopters.
Ocra Version 2.0 is a full bottom-up re-build, highly flexible and built to scale.
Operators use the Ocra software platform to manage as many third-party reservations platforms as they want as one central place to log in to manage rates, inventory, blackouts, and reporting.
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 is Ocra’s managed services offering which leverages the team’s parking expertise + the real-time data from its software platform to increase NOI for parking asset owners with no extra labor on their end or diversions from their core business (i.e., the guest experience).
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.
“Data-wise,” says Dunning, “we all know silos are inhibitive. The ‘one thought vs. another thought’ mentality is limiting and detrimental to growth.”
He continues:
“There is a way to bring the history of parking and all of its evolution into a place where everyone can participate and ask and answer questions and broaden their perspectives. In our experience as a company so far, it hasn’t been difficult to arrive at this place.”
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