“Fixed App” Parking App Secures Funding

The mobile app that helps fight parking tickets, Fixed, recently closed $1.2 million in seed funding, according to TechCrunch. Investors include Y Combinator, Merus Capital, and more. Fixed is based in San Francisco and launched this January.

Users of the app can snap photos of their parking tickets using an iOS device. Fixed then checks for errors before writing a customized contest letter on the user’s behalf, serving as a method of fighting the payment process. It is then sent to the city. Since opening, Fixed has seen 35,000 users sign up for its service, and has opened its waitlist to the San Francisco metro area.

However, San Francisco itself hasn’t been “cooperative,” which may have caused the lack of pushback by citizens.

“San Francisco doesn’t have a way to submit a contest electronically, they insist that you mail it in,” said co-founder David Hegarty in the article. “After one or two contests got ‘lost in the mail’ we started faxing our submissions so we’d have an electronic record of delivery.” The city, however, then put a stop to the faxes.

Currently, Fixed sees 1 percent of the city’s 28,000 weekly parking tickets being filtered through its app – about 300+ tickets per week. Since March, it has been growing its volume at 25-35 percent per week, even moreso since removing the waitlist.

For tickets themselves, “win rates are at 20 percent to 30 percent,” depending on what type of violation.

Hegarty said he thought that the Fixed win rate would be higher if the SFMTA followed the San Francisco Transportation Code and Californian Vehicle Code. As for how his company plans to keep the city honest, Hegarty said the company would be experimenting with a few different tactics, but did not give further details.

In the future, Fixed also has longer-term goals of expanding into other major U.S. cities including New York and L.A.

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