Welcome to Metropolis: Series A
By: Alex Israel
Tags: Mobility, Cities, Artificial Intelligence, Venture Capital, Technology

In 2017, we launched Metropolis in stealth. We set out to empower the future of mobility. We’ve flown under the radar preparing for this moment, the start of our next chapter. Today I’m thrilled to announce the close of our Series A: a $41M round led by 3L with participation from 01 Advisors, Dragoneer and Slow Ventures, as well as investments from some of the biggest names in global real estate including Starwood, RXR, DivcoWest and Dan Doctoroff. This round allows us to enter the market in an extraordinarily strong position, having raised more than $60 million.

At Metropolis, we’re starting simply and tangibly — repurposing, reimagining and reinvigorating parking. I know what you’re thinking: “parking…again?” But, let me pull the curtain back on why and exactly what lies within this “boring” industry.

Parking represents the last bastion of non-institutionalized, underdeveloped, underutilized, and under-monetized real estate in the US. This concrete jungle makes up more than 15% of the surface area of our entire urban landscape. These forgotten assets often plague real estate portfolios with inefficiency, ineptitude, cash, complacency and theft. All this is to say, parking is the final frontier of real estate. The industry needs to redefine how it conceptualizes, operates, and monetizes its parking assets. Enter Metropolis.

We’re bringing the antiquated and inefficient parking experience into the 21st century. While technology powers our lives and fuels our dreams of flying cars and robot taxis… how we park remains hopelessly analog. At Metropolis, we’ve developed an artificial intelligence platform, leveraging computer vision technology to connect all the pieces of the messy parking world so that you — the consumer — can finally have a seamless, checkout-free parking experience. You drive in, you drive out — that’s it. No tickets, no cash, no fumbling with apps, no driving around aimlessly, and better yet, no sitting in traffic behind others searching for parking. Metropolis removes all the barriers between drivers, parking operators and real estate owners to create a remarkable experience for consumers. And, parking is just the beginning; it enables Metropolis to empower the future of urban mobility.

Parking is the foundation and the infrastructure for advanced, urban mobility (self-driving cars and vertical take-off and landing vehicles) and likewise, for Metropolis. Today, slow, inefficient transportation defines the urban reality of billions of people. Tomorrow, advanced urban mobility will reimagine our lives and our urban landscape — driving equitability, and economic prosperity through the efficient movement of people, goods and services. This inevitable future provides Metropolis with a clear opportunity, as massive companies invest substantial resources to deploy new modalities (scooters, ebikes, autonomous vehicles, electric cars and eVTOLs). We’ll be there to empower each journey and every mobility experience, big or small, near or far.

I am humbled to share a glimpse of our vision and to share this milestone, which fuels our expansion into more than 30 markets this year. Think New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Nashville, Detroit, Austin, Dallas, Seattle and more.

This is day one for us. I couldn’t be more thankful for the Metropolis team and the seed investors that helped get us here including Zigg Capital, Slow Ventures, Halogen Ventures, Baron Davis, and Jamie McAlpine. We’re incredibly excited about the opportunity ahead!

-Alex

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Alex Israel, Co-Founder + CEO of Metropolis

Alex Israel is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Metropolis. Previously he was Vice President and General Manager of INRIX, a leading global traffic intelligence provider connecting cars to smarter cities in more than 60 countries around the world. In 2009, Alex Co-Founded ParkMe to facilitate a paradigm shift within navigation and grew the company to become the world’s most comprehensive parking database, offering insight for over 60,000 parking locations across the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia. With more than a decade of experience building mobility platforms, Alex started Metropolis to make cities more efficient and to support the future of urban mobility.