Payment and Urban Mobility: Passport Raises $65 Million

FACTS

• Passport –start-up specialising in mobile car parking payment services and urban mobility solutions– just raised $65 million, lifting their valuation to $125 million.

• This round table was led by Rho Capital Partners, H.I.G Growth Partners and ThornTree Capital Partners.
• Goal: enhance Passport’s software platform, expand their ecosystem.
• Passport was founded in 2010 to feature mobile payment solutions for car parking, ticketing, tolling or licences. Their services are already implemented in several large cities including Chicago, Boston, Portland, Miami, Toronto, Vancouver, Montréal and London.
• They grew stronger over the past years: their revenue increased by 511% from 2015 to 2018. They also doubled their workforce this year: they now hire 300 employees. And Passport acquired three companies.
• This new investment should contribute to expanding their mobility-focused platform. They would intend to enable cities and municipalities to manage their mobility ecosystems through a single hub.

Passport: Key figures

• 1,000 customers
• 450 cities, universities and private operators
• 5,000 locations worldwide
• 100M transactions processed each year, or $1.5B
• $125M raised

CHALLENGES

• Gradual evolution. Passport was initially founded to enable municipalities to directly connect with commuters and process car parking-related mobile transactions. The point was to make this process frictionless. Over the years, based on a secure payment system, their platform built up to include governmental entities and universities, as well.
• Transparent mobility. They would intend to craft an open ecosystem whereby all entities could rely on their transactional infrastructure to streamline payment processes. This start-up is also expected to announce more partnerships planning on using their APIs to simplify mobile car parking payment.

MARKET PERSPECTIVE

• In July 2019, Passport launched a pilot project for companies focusing on micro-mobility services, e.g.: Spin, start-up specialising in electric scooters. A month later, they started enabling cities to charge scooter operators for parking services.
• Digital parking payment companies are of high interest to investors. Just like Passport, SpotHero (start-up focusing on mobile car payment, too) raised $50 million earlier this year.