Jonathon Barkl Is Teaching Parking Lots to Pay Attention

The first version of AirGarage was not a parking company so much as a bargain between two people. Jonathon Barkl was an Arizona State University student facing a familiar campus problem: the official garage cost about $1,000 a year. Across the street, private driveways sat empty. Barkl and his future co-founder Scott Fitsimones began knocking on doors until they met a homeowner named Ari, who had two spaces and one car. The deal was simple. Pay $100 and park there for the year.

Barkl told his friends. His friends wanted the same thing. In that small loop, the outline of a marketplace appeared: unused space on one side, expensive inconvenience on the other, and software waiting somewhere in between. Barkl and Fitsimones surveyed 250 students. Nearly a third said they did not park on campus, with price the leading reason. They began listing nearby driveways and called the project AirGarage.

It was an appealingly clean startup story. It was also incomplete. A driveway marketplace could connect supply and demand, but the founders soon learned that the larger opportunity lived in the awkward work around the transaction. Someone had to price the spaces, collect payment, market the lot, answer owners, handle enforcement, and keep the operation moving when software met asphalt. AirGarage gradually stopped acting like a listing site and started acting like the operator.

A made-up company with real pens

Entrepreneurship did not arrive in Barkl's life as a Silicon Valley revelation. Both of his parents ran small businesses. His father independently trained people on IT systems, often at military bases. His mother built a real estate transaction-coordination practice. At home, hiring someone to fix a problem was rarely the first option. The family installed flooring, changed the oil in their cars, and built a garden themselves.

As a child, Barkl discovered that promotional-product sellers would send samples. He ordered engraved pens for a company he had invented: Barkl Industries. The package confused his parents. He explained that it was the company he planned to start someday. The business existed only in his head, but the gesture makes more sense beside another childhood story. When his parents offered to pay half the cost of a marching-band trip to Disney World, Barkl found the rest by posting on neighborhood HOA boards around North Phoenix, collecting cans, crushing them, and taking them to a recycling center.

The trait here is less romance than economy. If money is scarce, spend time. If the answer is unclear, make the test cheap. AirGarage's first supply strategy followed exactly that pattern. The founders walked up to strangers' homes and asked for inventory. Later, they approached churches, hotels, and businesses whose lots emptied at useful hours. They managed the locations themselves in the Arizona heat. The product was being discovered one uncomfortable task at a time.

“How can we test things as fast and cheaply as possible?”Jonathon Barkl on the question AirGarage returns to when running a new experiment

Physics, economics, and the two-ton object

At ASU, Barkl pursued bachelor's degrees in physics and economics. He worked with the Arizona Microcredit Initiative, participated in NASA Space Grant research, and studied diamond photochemistry. In 2019, he and three collaborators published a peer-reviewed paper showing how visible light striking diamond films could support a chemical reaction that reduces nitrogen to ammonia. It is a long way from a parking garage, yet Barkl has said physics taught him how to think and how to ask the right questions.

Parking offered questions with unusually visible consequences. A car is a valuable machine that spends most of its life waiting. Land in a city is expensive, yet a parking lot can be treated as a fixed rectangle with a machine at the entrance. Barkl once described the absurdity as the daily hunt for somewhere to put a “2-ton hunk of steel.” Economics supplied the tension: abundant capacity can coexist with painful scarcity when the market is poorly organized.

The marketplace approach opened new supply, but it did not control enough of the experience. By 2018, AirGarage was working with entire lots at churches and hotels. The team built a fuller system around payments, enforcement, license plate recognition, marketing, maintenance, and pricing. The choice violated the usual advice to keep a software startup light. It also brought AirGarage closer to every signal that could improve an owner's revenue or a driver's experience.

When the cars disappeared

Then the roads emptied. In the first pandemic lockdowns, AirGarage's revenue fell roughly 90 percent. Its customers at the time were often churches and other businesses creating public parking for the first time. Those locations depended on ordinary movement through cities. Movement had stopped.

The crisis exposed another customer with a sharper problem. Owners of downtown real estate had leased garages to traditional parking operators, often for a fixed payment. With demand collapsing, some operators could no longer honor those commitments. AirGarage offered owners a revenue-share arrangement that aligned both sides around the actual performance of a property. The company stayed in parking but changed whom it served and how deeply it served them.

This was not a pivot away from physical work. It was a decision to accept more of it. The team could now combine software with direct operating responsibility. The payoff was a better feedback loop. Instead of selling a tool to an operator and hoping it was used well, AirGarage could see the property, make a change, and measure what happened next.

Observation before optimization

Barkl's current argument starts with visibility. Most parking, he has said, remains offline. A traditional operator may report that revenue fell without being able to explain the cause. AirGarage collects occupancy, local-event, weather, driver-behavior, and competitor-pricing data. Its cameras can recognize license plates. Its payment system sees transactions. With those streams connected, a lot stops being static real estate and becomes a changing market.

The distinction between property management and asset management matters to Barkl. Property management keeps the lot open and clean. Asset management asks why revenue is down 15 percent, why Tuesday fills up while Thursday does not, or whether a garage changes the economics of an acquisition. Barkl has written about an owner who invited AirGarage to evaluate a purchase after the company doubled performance at existing properties. The parking operator had become a participant in the capital decision.

“Before you can optimize an asset, you need to observe it.”Jonathon Barkl, announcing AirGarage's Series B

This is where AirGarage fits into the current enthusiasm for artificial intelligence without becoming a generic AI story. A model can only act on the context it receives. In the physical world, context must be captured by hardware, software, and people doing the unglamorous work of keeping the system accurate. Cameras and sensors make the lot legible. Pricing algorithms then have something real to respond to.

By July 2025, the company said revenue had grown more than tenfold since its 2021 Series A. It managed more than 300 facilities across 38 states and had processed more than 10 million parking sessions. AirGarage was cash-flow positive, with more annualized revenue than all the capital it had burned over its lifetime. The $23 million Series B, led by Headline Growth, brought total funding to $41 million. Customers included national real-estate firms Hines and Greystar, along with Meta.

Focus is a habit, not a slogan

Barkl's public advice tends to return to contact with reality. He tells early founders to get in front of customers who are not friends or family and ask them to pay. A logo, investor conversation, or polished product can create the feeling of progress. Payment is harder to misunderstand. On a 2024 founder podcast, he framed early sales as a way to build before building: discover the objection, sell the outcome, and let the customer define what deserves to exist.

The idea carries an echo from his ASU years. Before a 2018 TEDxASU event, Barkl said his biggest challenge was putting enough energy into one thing to make real progress. Yet he remains visibly curious. In a 2020 conversation, he arrived with a list of startup ideas, talked about waste, energy infrastructure, and business insurance, and described long walks through San Francisco as a release valve for entrepreneurial curiosity. His morning habit at the time was to read for an hour before checking his phone.

There are lighter clues, too. Barkl says his name rhymes with “sparkle.” In a 2025 founder questionnaire, he chose black coffee as his drink, Waffle House's All-Star Special as his last meal, and parking tickets as the objects sitting on his desk. Asked what surprised him about being a founder, he pointed to the reward of building a team and watching people grow. The answer is telling. AirGarage began as a transaction between a student and a homeowner. At scale, the system is still built from people noticing one another's needs.

Earning the right to go broader

Parking is not the final boundary Barkl draws around the company. It is the place where AirGarage intends to prove a broader thesis. Real estate is often offline and underused. Once cameras, sensors, software, and operating processes make an asset observable, data can guide decisions that once depended on periodic reports and intuition. Barkl has mentioned office space and hotels as possible extensions of that capability.

The ambition is carefully sequenced. AirGarage must first keep earning the right to expand by operating parking well. That means the mundane details remain inseparable from the grander language of an “Intelligence Age.” A camera has to read a plate. A price has to fit a local event. A property owner needs to understand why Thursday changed. A driver needs to park without fighting a broken machine.

The original insight was that empty driveways had value. The more durable insight was that value does not release itself. It needs a system with enough context to make a decision and enough operational control to carry it out. Barkl's path from physics lab to parking lot makes intuitive sense on those terms. Both reward the patient act of observation.

AirGarage's story is still written on pavement: a sequence of spaces, signals, and small decisions. Barkl's bet is that once the physical world learns to report what it is doing, even a parking lot can become an intelligent asset.