Parka has closed a seed round to accelerate its expansion across the Nordics. The raise will fund new city launches, further investment in the operator platform, and a growing team based in Reykjavík.
Parking across the region is at an inflection point. Cities are densifying, tourism is climbing back, and the old model — barriers, tickets, and disconnected systems — is straining. Parka's bet is that the answer isn't more hardware, but less: cameras instead of gates, an app instead of a meter.
Growth won't change the company's starting principle: spend energy on helping, simplifying, and automating rather than adding friction.
The ambition isn't to make parking exciting. It's to make it something you never have to think about.
Ask most operators how a lot is performing and they'll tell you the revenue. It's genuinely important, but it's the least useful number for improving anything, because it tells you what happened without telling you why. These five, tracked together, tell the fuller story.
A lot can be 90% full and still underperforming if dwell time is long and turnover is low. A lot with modest occupancy can outperform it with high turnover and strong compliance.
Revenue tells you what happened. These five tell you what to do about it.
Long dwell and low turnover? Your pricing may be rewarding all-day parkers. Strong occupancy but weak revenue per space? You may be underpriced. High occupancy and low compliance? You're not short on demand — you're short on collection.
Operators who track only revenue are flying with one instrument. Add the other four and the same lot suddenly has a dashboard instead of a single dial.
For most drivers, parking is one car and one decision. For a tour operator, it's a moving fleet on a clock that never stops — coaches arriving and departing all day, drivers who need a space now, and shared lots where a single misallocation ripples through the whole schedule.
Instead of tracking vehicles across phone calls and paper lists, you see the entire fleet in one place: which coaches are parked where, which sessions are active, and what each is costing. You can't schedule what you can't see, and most fleet parking pain comes from exactly that blindness.
A coach idling while its driver hunts for space is a departure at risk. Pre-booking shared bays removes that risk: the space is held before the vehicle arrives.
The bigger win is predictability. When parking is scheduled rather than improvised, the whole operation gets more reliable — fewer late departures, fewer frustrated drivers, fewer surprises at month-end.
At one vehicle, parking is a task. At forty, it's either a system or a crisis.
Tækniþjónustufyrirtækið Parka gagnrýnir þá umræðu sem hefur verið í fjölmiðlum undanfarna daga varðandi innheimtu bílastæða- og vangreiðslugjalda en félagið hefur verið sakað um að hjálpa ekki notendum og að innheimta óhófleg vangreiðslugjöld.
Freyr Ólafsson og Þorsteinn Guðjónsson, framkvæmda- og sölustjóri Parka, segja að félagið hafi fyrst og fremst verið stofnað til að koma til móts við aukið flæði ferðamanna og þéttingu byggðar.
Þetta er pínu lítið eins og að skjóta kortafyrirtæki fyrir verðlagið í matvöruverslun. Við erum vissulega þjónustuaðilinn og nafnið sem fólk sér á bílastæðum, en við teljum umræðuna ekki sanngjarna á öllum stöðum.
Hann bætir við að Parka sé ekki í neinu stríði við hvorki Neytendasamtökin né Neytendastofu, sem sektaði félagið í síðasta mánuði.
Runólfur Ólafsson, framkvæmdastjóri Félags íslenskra bifreiðaeigenda, sagði í viðtali við Morgunblaðið að bílastæðaumhverfið væri orðið allt of flókið og að óvissan gerði lífið erfiðara fyrir neytendur.
Þorsteinn segir að það sé margt nýtt í greiðsluferli bílastæða sem bæði fyrirtæki og neytendur séu að læra jafnóðum inn á.
Það er ekki markmið hjá Parka að rukka fólk sem var að reyna að greiða.
Parka bendir á að vangreiðslugjöld séu notuð víða um heim sem fælingarmáttur fyrir ökumenn sem hyggjast ekki greiða fyrir stæði.
Við tökum öllum ábendingum vel og við erum í liði með neytendum. Við erum ungt íslenskt nýsköpunarfyrirtæki sem vill frekar eyða orkunni í að hjálpa, einfalda og sjálfvirknivæða.
Every HR team knows the request. "Is there a parking space free?" It arrives by email, by chat, by someone leaning into the doorway — and answering it, over and over, adds up to a job nobody was hired to do. Staff parking looks like a small perk on paper. In practice, it's an administrative drip that never quite stops.
The cost is in the accumulation of small tasks: the waitlist that needs updating, the permit that got lost, the space reassigned when someone leaves. That spreadsheet is usually the real problem — a single source of truth only one person can edit, that goes stale the moment someone parks somewhere else.
Many organisations believe they're short on spaces when they're short on visibility. Once usage is measured, a familiar pattern appears: a chunk of "assigned" spaces sit empty on any given day. Reclaiming that slack can solve a shortage without a single new space.
Most parking shortages aren't a supply problem. They're a visibility problem wearing a supply problem's clothes.
The humble parking barrier is one of the most expensive small machines in any lot — not because of what it costs to buy, but what it costs to keep working: the jams, the broken arms, the queues, the support calls at the worst moment. Smart Access removes the barrier entirely, without giving up a single piece of control.
Cameras at the entrance and exit read licence plates as vehicles pass. A session opens automatically on entry and closes on exit, and billing runs quietly against the plate. There's nothing to press, take, or lose. For the driver it feels like the lot simply knows them; for the operator, every movement is logged with a timestamp and a plate.
The common worry is enforcement. The answer is that the camera is a better gate than the gate was: every plate is recorded, unpaid sessions are flagged automatically, and the system handles the rest — without ever forming a queue.
The barrier was never really controlling access. It was just slowing everyone down while it did.
Smart Access suits sites where flow matters — retail lots with peaks, mixed-use developments, anywhere a queue at the gate becomes a queue on the street.
When Creed Media's finance team first mapped how money actually moved through their parking operations, the diagram took up a whiteboard. Eight separate systems, each holding a piece of the truth, none talking to the others. Every report was a reconciliation. Every month-end was a negotiation between spreadsheets that disagreed.
They didn't want a faster version of that. They wanted to stop doing it altogether.
The eight tools had accumulated the way these things always do — one for payments, another for access, a third for reporting, each solving a real problem and quietly creating a new one.
For Creed Media, "modernise finance" meant three specific things: see the whole operation in one place, cut the manual work that didn't add value, and trust the numbers enough to decide on them without a second check.
We didn't want better reports. We wanted to stop building reports by hand.
Consolidating onto Parka let the team collapse the stack from eight systems to three. Payments, access, and reporting shared one backbone, so the handoffs could be automated instead of stitched together every month. The migration happened function by function, starting with the reconciliation that hurt most.
Month-end stopped being a dreaded scramble and became a routine close. The hours that used to disappear into reconciliation went into the questions finance is actually for — where margins were thinning, which sites were underperforming, what to do about it.
We stopped managing tools and started managing the business.
Ask people about their worst parking-app moment and you'll rarely hear about paying. You'll hear about forgetting to stop. The meeting ran long, the phone stayed in the bag, and the session kept charging in an empty space hours after the car was gone. It's the small, self-inflicted annoyance — and it's the one we set out to remove.
In zones equipped with cameras, you now only do half the work. You check in when you arrive, and that's the end of your involvement. When you drive out, the camera reads your plate and ends the session for you — automatically, to the minute.
Camera zones are marked when you check in, with a note confirming check-out is automatic. In zones without cameras nothing changes — you stop the session with a single tap.
The most common parking mistake was never forgetting to pay. It was forgetting to stop. Now you can't.
If you drive an electric car, you know the awkward dance. One app to find a charger, another to pay for the parking space it sits in, and a third moment of doubt about whether you've been charged for both — or neither. Charging and parking have always been two separate chores, even though they happen in the same place at the same time.
That never made sense. So we joined them.
No more wondering if the parking lapsed while the car charged. No more two receipts to reconcile. No more arriving at a "charger" that's really just a normal bay. Because availability and charging status live in the same place, you can decide before you leave whether a stop will actually work.
Two things that always happen together should never have needed two apps.
For longer journeys it's genuinely useful: line up where you'll charge and park in one view, see the prices up front, and treat the stop as a single predictable step.
Reykjavík in winter runs on a different set of rules than Reykjavík in summer, and the changes rarely come with a heads-up. A reliable overnight spot can become a no-go the night a storm rolls in. Knowing the patterns is the difference between a quiet morning and a cold search for a towed car.
The most important thing in winter is knowing when crews are due on your street. When clearing is scheduled, some routes need to be completely empty — and cars that stay put get moved, at the owner's cost. Priority follows traffic importance: main arteries first, side streets later.
Snow piled at the kerb narrows usable space, and temporary restrictions appear around clearing routes. The app's zone rules update with these changes, so a quick look before you leave beats trusting last week's memory.
Winter doesn't punish the unprepared with drama. It punishes them with a scraper, a cold morning, and a tow notice.
Respect the clearing schedule, check zone rules before you park, and keep a garage or two in your back pocket. Do that, and winter parking becomes just another part of the season.
Everyone has a rough sense that parking downtown is annoying. Nobody really knows the number. So we measured it — not with a survey, but with a stopwatch, a full tank, and a week of stubborn repetition.
Same three blocks in the city centre. Same arrival window, 8:40 to 9:00. One driver, one rule: start the clock entering the zone, stop it when the handbrake goes on. No cheating toward a known good street.
Across five mornings, the average hunt took just over eight minutes. But the average hides the story, which is the range.
The unpredictability was the worst part. Never knowing whether today was a two or a nineteen.
Multiply eight minutes across two commutes a day, most weeks of the year, and you land north of sixty hours annually — a full workweek and a half spent looking at bumpers.
Eight minutes doesn't sound like much until you multiply it by every trip you take.
On the days we checked availability before leaving, the hunt basically vanished — not because spaces appeared, but because we stopped driving to the block that never has any. The parking was never the problem. The blindness was.
Paying for parking used to mean a small ritual: find the meter, dig for coins, print the slip, walk back, place it just so. Pay by plate deletes the entire ritual. Your licence plate becomes your ticket.
Your plate is registered as paid for that zone. When a warden or camera checks the space, your plate comes back clear. When you leave, parking ends automatically in camera zones, or you tap once elsewhere. You're only charged for the time you used.
No slip to blow off the dash. No coins you didn't have. No guessing how long you'll be — you can extend from your phone without walking anywhere.
The best interface for parking is almost no interface at all.
If you get stuck, the Help Center walks through it — but most people never need it.
Few things start a trip worse than circling a full airport lot with a flight to catch and a clock that won't stop. You planned the packing, the route, the buffer time — and then the one variable you didn't control turns into the thing that makes you sweat at security.
It's an avoidable kind of stress, and the fix takes less than a minute.
Open the app, enter your travel dates, and choose a lot near your terminal. You'll see the price up front, confirm, and you're done — your space is held before you've even zipped the suitcase. When you arrive, you drive straight in.
Book as early as your plans are firm. If your return is uncertain, choose a lot with flexible exit. And take a photo of where you parked — even a guaranteed space is easy to forget after a week away.
The goal isn't just a cheaper space. It's one less thing to think about on the morning of a flight.
Every driver has a default. Some will circle for twenty minutes rather than pay for a garage; others pull into the first structure they see and never think about the street. Both are leaving money — or time — on the table, because the smarter choice flips depending on a single variable: how long you're staying.
If you're parking for under an hour, street parking is almost always the better deal. Meter rates are typically lower per minute than a garage's minimum, and you're parked closer to where you're going. The catch is availability — and that's exactly where checking before you leave turns a gamble into a decision.
Once you cross the two-to-three hour mark, the maths inverts. Most garages cap their daily rate, while a street meter just keeps ticking — and often caps your stay anyway. For a full day out, a garage is usually both cheaper and calmer.
There's one more thing to weigh: certainty. A garage isn't just about price — it's about knowing you have a space. For anything time-sensitive, the few extra kronur can be the best money you spend all day.
Cheap parking you can't find isn't cheap. It's expensive in a currency you can't get back.
So next time you're weighing street against garage, don't start with price. Start with time — how long you're staying, and how much it would cost you to be late.
You know the feeling. You're two minutes from where you need to be, and then it starts — the slow crawl around the block, eyes darting between the road and every gap that turns out to be a fire hydrant, a driveway, or a space just a little too small to trust. By the time you finally squeeze in somewhere four streets away, the calm you had walking out the door is long gone.
It feels like bad luck. It isn't. It's a predictable, measurable tax on almost every trip you take — and once you see it clearly, it's surprisingly easy to stop paying.
Researchers who study urban traffic put the average driver at around 17 hours a year spent hunting for a spot. That's more than two full workdays, gone — not to driving anywhere useful, but to circling the same few blocks hoping something opens up.
And time is only the visible part of the bill. There's the extra fuel burned at two kilometres an hour, the low-grade stress that follows you into the meeting, and the circling itself, which makes up a real share of downtown congestion — meaning the hunt doesn't just cost you, it slows down everyone around you too.
The frustrating part is that almost all of it is avoidable. The information you'd need to skip the hunt entirely already exists. You just usually find it out too late, from the driver's seat, when your only tool is your own two eyes.
Imagine checking parking the way you check the weather: a glance before you leave, not a scramble once you arrive. That single shift changes the entire character of the trip.
The best parking spot is the one you never had to look for.
This doesn't ask much of you. It's one check before you pull out of the driveway — the same reflex as glancing at traffic. You do it once because it's easier, and then you keep doing it because the drive simply feels better.
Do it for a month and those 17 hours quietly come back to you, spread across dozens of journeys you'll barely remember. So the next time you're tempted to just wing it and hope a space appears, remember that hoping is the slow way. Knowing is the fast one — and it's already in your pocket.
The tech services company Parka is pushing back on the media debate of recent days regarding the collection of parking fees and late-payment (penalty) charges, after the company was accused of not helping users and of charging excessive penalty fees.
Freyr Ólafsson and Þorsteinn Guðjónsson, Parka's managing director and sales director, say the company was founded first and foremost to respond to increased tourist flow and urban densification, and that the goal is to make the parking payment process as smooth as possible.
They point out that Parka handles the payment service for fees that the parking lot owners themselves set for use of their lots, and that Parka does not set the pricing. They say the company welcomes all feedback it receives about its operations.
“This is a little bit like shooting the card company over grocery store prices. We are certainly the service provider and the name people see in the parking lots, and we also answer on behalf of the lot owners — but we don't think the discussion is fair in every respect,” says Þorsteinn.
He adds that Parka is not at war with either the Consumers' Association or the Consumer Agency (Neytendastofa), which fined the company last month, among other things.
“We take the Consumer Agency's good feedback on board, have already responded to their comments together with the lot owners, and are continuing to clarify matters and improve what can be improved.”
Runólfur Ólafsson, managing director of the Icelandic Automobile Association (FÍB), told Morgunblaðið today that the parking environment has become far too complicated and that the uncertainty makes life harder for consumers.
He says in the interview that FÍB sent recommendations to the Ministry of Infrastructure for improvements in the area but without result, and is also concerned about the operation of parking apps in rural regions.
Asked whether the operation has become too complex, Freyr Ólafsson of Parka says he gets the feeling that this argument has become a cliché for many who seem to feed on negative discussion.
“Companies build their own lots and have different premises, drivers and needs. Some don't want outside visitors and set tariffs for staying or penalty fees accordingly. Others want high turnover,” says Freyr — citing medical-practice lots where owners want to deter all-day parkers through pricing, while a lower fee is charged for an “appointment stop.”
Þorsteinn says there is much that is new in the parking payment process that both companies and consumers are learning as they go. Because of differing technology, things aren't always done the same way, which can create uncertainty and misunderstanding.
“In some places drivers have to check in and out, but in others, where cameras are present, you only check in and the camera checks you out. And we have a new automatic solution that handles both — but teaching users what to do at each location can be a challenge.”
He says Parka tries to be accommodating and works to help people who get in touch and can demonstrably show that they tried to pay.
“It is not Parka's goal to charge people who were trying to pay.”
Regarding high penalty fees, Þorsteinn says technology also plays a role: in places without cameras it is impossible for wardens to know when a car was parked, and he says the benchmark has been that penalty fees are on par with a full unpaid day of parking.
“I fully understand that people are unhappy about having to pay for something they didn't pay for before. Sorpa went through something similar when charging for waste began.”
Parka says it reiterates its stance toward the feedback it receives, but notes that elements like penalty fees are used around the world as a deterrent for drivers who do not intend to pay for parking.
“We try to learn as fast and as much as we can, and we want to improve what can be improved.”
Freyr and Þorsteinn say that in a perfect world everyone would pay on the spot, but say that when payment doesn't arrive immediately, another process begins in which the company has to find the vehicle owner, look up data, file claims with the bank and more — all of which carries cost.
“We welcome all feedback and we are on the consumers' side. We try to learn as fast and as much as we can and want to improve what can be improved. We are a young Icelandic innovation company that would rather spend its energy helping, simplifying and automating than fighting internet trolls. We are trying to do all of this to the best of our ability and want to continue doing so.”