QuickPay sets out to transform parking, with a little help from Twilio

QuickPay sets out to transform parking, with a little help from Twilio

We’d like to congratulate QuickPay, a Twilio customer that just closed a new round of funding.

QuickPay’s mission is to make parking easier. Instead of fumbling with parking machines, cash boxes and meters, people with the QuickPay smart phone app will be able to pay by touching their phones.

While we’ll never be able to get those hours back that we’ve already spent hunting for all the tickets that got misplaced in our messy cars, we are looking forward to an enhanced parking experience in the future. And we are proud that QuickPay chose to use the Twilio API to power its pay-by-voice and pay-by-text features.

This morning, QuickPay announced a strategic investment by Fontinalis Partners, an investment firm focused on transportation infrastructure. Chris Thomas, a co-founder of Fontinalis Partners, will join QuickPay’s board.

Barney Pell, QuickPay’s executive chairman, said the team sought out Fontinalis Partners, QuickPay’s first institutional investor, for their transportation expertise and their shared belief that the $26 billion parking industry is about to be transformed by new technologies.

Pell, who previously co-founded Powerset, a natural language search engine that was bought by Microsoft, said the same forces that upended Internet search—local, social, mobile, personal, and contextual technologies—are also poised to fundamentally alter parking.

At Twilio, we think one more transformative technology belongs on that list: cloud communications, which is making it easy for companies like QuickPay to add voice, VoIP and text messaging capabilities to their apps.

In a statement, William Clay Ford, Jr., a founding partner of Fontinalis Partners and the executive chairman of Ford Motor Company, said he was excited by the opportunity that QuickPay presents to “build value and create social good.”

We couldn’t agree more.