The team at Metropolis Technologies is going to grow by the end of the year thanks to a $167 million Series B funding round. The company is working to make parking easier through the use of its app.
Corey Owens, chief communications officer for the Santa Monica mobility technology company, said that Metropolis had 200 open positions as of late June and would grow to 2,500 employees by year’s end.
“We are hiring for everything from your mobility specialist that does maintenance and charging for vehicles to the computer vision engineer who is building cutting-edge technology,” Owens said.
The funding round was co-led by 3L Capital and Assembly Ventures, with participation from growth equity investors Eldridge, a co-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers headquartered in Greenwich, Conn.; Silver Lake Waterman, an investor in high-growth companies; Dragoneer Investment Group in San Francisco; and UP Partners, a Santa Monica investor in seed and early-stage ventures primarily in the transportation sector, among others.
Chris Thomas, co-founder and partner at Assembly Ventures and a new Metropolis board member, said that the mobility commerce opportunity in urban centers is immense.
“We believe Metropolis is building the most thoughtful, dynamic, flexible, and complete payment platform for the future of movement in the Western world and that seamless transactions in the physical world are the future of automotive and geospatial payment,” Thomas said in an emailed statement to the Business Journal.
Founded in 2017 by Chief Executive Alex Israel and three business partners, Metropolis has built a technology platform to make it easier to park your vehicle.
Owens described the backend tech as similar to what Amazon.com Inc. uses at its Amazon Go convenience stores. In those stores, which have no cashiers, customers use an app that is tied to computer vision and deep-learning algorithms for the purchase, checkout and payment steps associated with retail transactions.
In its app, Metropolis uses computer vision and machine learning to identify the vehicle of a member and then makes it possible to forgo the use of a credit card or other payment methods at a parking lot or garage.
Metropolis has its camera systems at more than 600 locations in some 60 cities around the country. It was able to scale up that quickly through the acquisition in March of its customer Premier Parking, a Nashville-based parking management company with facilities across the U.S., including in Cleveland, St. Louis, Denver and Detroit. In April of last year, Premier began to install Metropolis’ cameras at the parking structures it manages.
