Parking used to be the dead zone of commercial real estate, a gray area of gates, tickets, and confusion that quietly bled money while everyone looked the other way. Then Vend Park rolled in, lights on, system wired, and flipped the parking garage into a data-driven profit hub. The Boston-based startup just locked in a $17.5M Series A led by Blue Heron Capital, with Nuveen’s Real Asset Ventures, Communitas Capital, and investor John McMahon joining the ride. Returning believers Floating Point Capital, PagsGroup, Crossbeam Venture Partners, and Derive Ventures circled back, proof that Vend isn’t another SaaS platform chasing buzzwords, it’s the next layer of real estate infrastructure built for scale.
Co-Founders Michael Miele (CEO) and Karan Singhal (CTO) saw the inefficiency long before parking tech became cool. The legacy systems were clunky, fragmented, and allergic to user experience. They built Vend Park to make parking access invisible, hands-free gate entry, contactless payments, automated billing, unified reporting, all in one vertically integrated platform. When a 360K sq. ft. property in San Diego reports a 42% bump in transient parking revenue, 75% less time wasted on audits, and 133 hours saved per month for parkers, that’s not improvement, that’s transformation parked on concrete.
This is where engineering precision meets operator hustle. Karan Singhal designed Vend’s backbone: AI-powered access, LPR computer vision, and a real-time cloud command center that syncs every transaction. Michael Miele built the commercial muscle to bring in marquee clients like Nuveen, Jamestown, Harwood International, and Lincoln Property Company. Chief Operating Officer Pritesh Chandarana adds executional horsepower from Uber and OYO, while Tony Albanese, Head of Revenue since 10/31/23, turns 20+ years of parking and CRE knowledge into growth velocity that moves like traffic at rush hour, only smarter.
Vend’s performance backs the story. 35x growth in 24 months. Expansion from 3 cities to 15. Average NOI up 30%, operating costs down 30–50%. Integrations with SpotHero, ParkWhiz, and Cove make it the connective tissue between mobility, tenants, and buildings. Each transaction logs 80+ data points, feeding ML algorithms that adjust demand-based pricing in real time. It’s proptech that doesn’t just automate, it amplifies.
The investors saw it coming. Blue Heron Capital and the rest didn’t bet on hype, they bet on inevitability. The $17.5M raise fuels AI advancements, expansion into new markets, and hiring across engineering, sales, and customer success. As CRE modernizes, Vend Park isn’t chasing the future; it’s building it, one parking lot at a time.
