The Venture Codex

Participated · Equity · Mar 2022

ParkBee operates a parking platform that opens private car parks to the public and connects spots to drivers via partners such as RingGo, JustPark, Connect and Pay-By-Phone. The company has raised €30 million to fund expansion across Europe and growth in existing markets. ParkBee currently operates in the Netherlands and the U.K., and plans to roll out in Germany, France, Belgium and Ireland. CEO WP Boerma says car park owners who sign up access a demand pool of 45 million users via partner apps, and ParkBee has driven over 350% expansion in off-street spots in the U.K. over the last three years. The round was led by clean energy investor Koolen Industries and included participation from several tech entrepreneurs, investors and existing shareholders such as Statkraft Ventures and Innovation Quarter. Investors highlighted ParkBee’s scalable model and its potential role in facilitating the transition to EVs and cleaner cities. ParkBee retrofits private car parks with hardware that integrates with existing barriers and security systems and provides a cloud platform to control bookings and unlocking. The platform is integrated with consumer parking apps RingGo and Parkmobile, allowing users to unlock booked spaces. The company shares revenue with car park owners or, at larger locations, rents spots directly and splits consumer fees with partners. ParkBee launched in Amsterdam in early 2016 and now operates over 60 parking locations there and more than 20 private car parks in London. The startup recently raised new capital and plans to use the funds to accelerate U.K. expansion after bringing its offering to London. ParkBee works with property companies including JLL, BT and local U.K. councils to open secured parking to the public. ParkBee operates a platform that works with parking apps to make office building car park spaces accessible to the public, creating a new revenue stream for property owners. The company cooperates with Parkmobile and Park-line to enable access to those spaces. ParkBee raised €1.8M in funding to further develop its technology and to accelerate international expansion after opening its first office in London. The business is led by Managing Director Tom Buchmann, CTO Jian Jiang, and Commercial Director Wouter de Bruijne and is based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. ParkBee participated in the YES!Delft incubation program and Climate-KIC South Holland’s accelerator, and it is supported by the ESA Business Incubation Centre in Noordwijk.

Led · Equity · Feb 2022

TheyDo provides a journey management platform that enables organizations to manage complex customer journeys and optimize them for efficient growth. The platform supports journey strategy, planning and execution in a single system and helps align internal silos with the customer journey. TheyDo is used by global brands including Cisco, Ford, Johnson & Johnson, Home Depot and Polestar. Led by CEO Jochem van der Veer, the company has a team of 70 worldwide and expects to reach 100 before the end of the year. Financially, the company raised additional funding recently, bringing total capital to $50M. They plan to use the funds to further develop the platform, increase R&D, focus on AI and data ingestion, and build out their customer-facing team in the United States. TheyDo offers a "Journey Management" platform that tackles customer-centric alignment by showing where incoming metrics and quantitative data are linked and how they impact the customer journey. The product creates a comprehensive dashboard for teams across CX, product, marketing, sales and customer success to monitor and improve experiences. TheyDo says it is used by teams at Atlassian, Cisco, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, T‑Mobile, Qualtrics and the Dutch Postal Service. The platform emerged from the founders' CX agency work, where they built software to scale the consulting engagements they were doing for large enterprises. Financially, TheyDo recently closed a €12 million Series A round. Investors and founders frame the product as addressing a broader market trend of organising large organisations around the customer perspective to reduce fragmentation. TheyDo develops a user-friendly Journey Management System that unites customer insights, data integrations and cross-functional workflows so teams across design, engineering and marketing can work from a single source of truth. The software is intended to pull fragmented information together that often lives in many places across organizations, a problem the founders say was highlighted during widespread remote work. TheyDo says its product enables companies to structure and manage customer journeys, make teams’ work more transparent and accelerate product and service innovation. The startup counts Dutch customers including Bol.com, PostNL, Jumbo and insurer VGZ, and US customers such as Johnson & Johnson and NCR. With the new funding, TheyDo plans to expand its team and deepen integrations with data-mapping and research tools including Qualtrics, Medallia, Google Analytics and Salesforce. It intends to hire additional engineers to fuel a worldwide rollout, with the US identified as a core target market.