He left the automotive industry to fix something almost everyone ignores - where cars stop. A decade later, his company Get My Parking runs the software behind parking gates on four continents.
In December 2012, Chirag Jain boarded a train that would change his career. The Jagriti Yatra is a 15-day, roughly 8,000-kilometer journey across India, packed with young people chasing the idea of building something. On it, he met Rasik Pansare. Three years later, the two launched Get My Parking.
Jain's route to parking was not obvious. He graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2013 and spent about two years inside the automotive industry. The cars were interesting. But he kept circling back to a duller, more universal frustration - the hunt for a place to leave the car once you arrived. Parking was everywhere, and almost nowhere was it organized.
So in July 2015, he and Pansare registered Get My Parking in New Delhi and started wiring up lots. The early bet was frugal by design: build affordable, white-labeled software that any operator could bolt onto existing infrastructure, rather than ripping out gates and starting over. Within months the team had deployed 50 systems across Delhi NCR. By early 2016 the platform had processed its first million tickets.
Momentum came quickly for an unglamorous category. The company powered digital parking for the Maha Kumbh Mela, an event whose crowd size is measured in the tens of millions - a stress test few consumer apps ever face. Angel money arrived, then a pre-Series A, then a roughly $3 million Series A in 2017. That same year, Business World's Disrupt list named Jain to its 40 Under 40.
What followed was expansion that looked improbable for a small, capital-efficient team out of India. Get My Parking acquired the EV charging platform Constapark in 2018 and struck a deal with APCOA, Europe's largest parking operator, deploying across more than a dozen countries. Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Australia followed. The United States became a serious focus, with rollouts spanning California, Florida, Colorado and Georgia.
Jain's framing for all of it is disarmingly simple. Parking, he argues, should be a "sub-conscious experience" - you arrive, you leave, and the technology never asks for your attention. Get My Parking's job is to make the gate, the payment and the permit disappear.
By 2025 that meant leaning hard into AI. The company built its own models to sharpen license plate recognition and launched AVA, an AI support agent that talks to drivers stuck at exit kiosks. It speaks multiple languages, works through background noise, and knows local parking rules. Operators using it reported an 84% drop in intercom support calls. The same summer, Get My Parking turned ten.
Ask Jain for the mantra behind a decade of compounding, unflashy progress and the answer is a single word he has given before: persistence. It is now one of his company's stated values - which tells you he means it.
This was the year we doubled down on AI, building our own native models to improve license plate recognition accuracy.Chirag Jain • on Get My Parking's 2025 roadmap
Rather than replace parking hardware, Get My Parking set out to digitize whatever was already installed - at the lowest possible price. That retrofit-first approach is what let a small India-based team win contracts against far larger incumbents in Europe and North America.
AVA is our AI-powered customer support agent for exit kiosks - instant and human-like.
It speaks multiple languages, works through noise, and understands local parking rules.
AI will continue to unlock new efficiencies for operators and new conveniences for parkers.
The industry is shifting toward more ticketless, cashless, camera-first solutions.
Co-founded and scaled Get My Parking to operations in 13+ countries.
Named to Business World Disrupt's 40 Under 40 in 2017.
Powered digital parking for the Maha Kumbh Mela, the world's largest gathering.
Best Delegate at the New York Global Young Leaders Summit under a UNDP program.
Won the UK Government's Tech Rocketship Award (2016).
Partnered with APCOA, Europe's largest parking operator.
Company recognized in Economic Times '50 Hot Startups' and NASSCOM Emerge 50.
Won the BMW Global Supplierthon Award for Digital Services (2020).
Launched AVA AI agents, cutting operator intercom calls by 84%.
The Get My Parking co-founder and CEO speaks with Parking-net about where smart parking is heading.
He trained as an automotive engineer but ended up solving where cars stop, not how they move.
The founding partnership began on a moving train, not in an office or accelerator.
He has a stated interest in urban planning, which shaped his focus on smart cities.
His company handled parking at an event drawing tens of millions of people.
His one-word success mantra, "persistence," became a company value.
A professor once called him one of the most enterprising students at IIT Madras.