Chinese car parking management firm Sunsea Parking has secured $100 million in a Series B round of financing from global investment bank Goldman Sachs’s venture department and Korean PE firm Anchor Equity Partners, according to a company statement on Tuesday.
Chinese new economy-focused investment bank Paradigm Advisors was the advisor for the Series B round.
With the funding, Sunsea expects to expedite the integration of smart parking services and technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), big data, and AI, it said.
“We will be together to create an efficient and safe smart parking platform which aims to expedite the digitalization of the industry,” said Xinyi Feng, a managing director at Goldman Sachs’s venture department, in the statement.
Sunsea, which claims to be China’s largest parking assets operator, offers its services in over 40 cities in the country. Set up in 2006, the company has been providing intelligent offerings including urban parking advisory, parking lot planning and design, and parking investment. As of December 2020, it managed more than 500,000 parking spaces.
Sunsea has forged partnerships with a slew of marquee real state developers and management groups including Wanke, Wanda, Longfor, and Savills, among others.
In March 2019, Sunsea had teamed up with global car parking and individual mobility giant Indigo Group launching a JV to drive investment in Chinese parking platforms. Sunsea has a 60% stake in the JV, while the latter holds the rest. In addition, Sunsea had also joined hands with Warburg and Alibaba’s Ant investing in Beijing-based internet parking platform TJD Parking in 2018.
In November 2017, Sunsea Parking had closed a 1.5 billion yuan ($232 million) Series A round led by the US-based PE giant Warburg Pincus with participation from China’s Macalline Furnitures. In 2016, Sunsea had secured its debut angel funding from Merryland Group’s investment arm Hilevel.
The size for China’s parking market crossed 800 billion yuan ($124 billion) in 2020.