Technology

Josh Raphael, the founder and CEO of Parket, says it all started with a few vacant bays. He was working at a shared office space in Bree Street, Cape Town, where parking spots are notoriously hard to find. People were repeatedly asking the workspace owners if they could rent bays, but the owners thought it would be too much admin. Raphael, an ad-hoc developer and civil engineer, spent the next three months coding a payment gateway. “People started booking through the website to park in the building,” he says. Next, Raphael noticed an open piece of land and, after a bit of convincing, filled it up using his parking website. “And then I decided this could be a full-time thing, the Airbnb of parking. There’s a whole market looking for extra parking and it could be made more efficient,” he says. The landlord with the empty lot also gave Raphael the former Netcare Christiaan Barnard Memorial Hospital, which had a floor of vacant bays he wanted to fill. “He eventually said, ‘Can you actually just take the whole building?’” Raphael laughs.

What Raphael eventually came to realise is that his solution was missing access control. He built a QR code system with a Raspberry Pi and solar power setup. The idea was that the driver would show their QR code and the boom would open. “But after about two weeks, guys jumped over and stole the solar power system and Raspberry Pi,” recalls Raphael. He found an open source licence plate reader algorithm online, built an app and used QR codes for payments instead. At that point, he had rolled Parket out to Pam Golding on Main in Kenilworth in Cape Town, which is where he encountered a different problem altogether. The building had a retirement village next door and the majority of the residents couldn’t work out how to use QR codes for payments. “And that’s how we ended up designing a machine kiosk,” says Raphael. “We were really struggling. There were a lot of complaints and if parking is not 100% right, it’s World War III.”