ParkX, a Scottsdale company founded by graduates of the University of Arizona’s entrepreneurship program, has been acquired by parking-payments provider Passport Inc.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
ParkX was founded in 2012 as Park Genius by Thomas Maguire, Austin Weiss and Ross Shanken, alumni of the McGuire Entrepreneurship Program at the UA Eller College of Management.
The company’s technology allows users to pay for parking and add meter time on their smartphones. The ParkX system was piloted in downtown Tucson and on the UA campus in 2013 and is now used in 15 markets, including Austin, El Paso and Corpus Christi, and at universities including the University of Texas-El Paso and and Eastern Washington University, as well as some parking lots near Talking Stick Resort Arena in Phoenix.
Passport Inc., based in Charlotte, North Carolina, provides mobile parking payment services in more than 20 of the top 50 cities in North America and more than 2,000 locations, including Chicago, Toronto, Boston, Portland, Detroit and Miami.
Passport also provides transit payments, enforcement and permit-management services and manages the parking-payment app and trans it payment app for ParkTucson, the city’s parking authority.
In 2015, Park Genius won a $250,000 grant in the Arizona Innovation Challenge, a startup competition sponsored by the Arizona Commerce Authority.
Maguire said the intention is for the ParkX executives to join Passport, but their roles are still to be determined and nothing has been finalized.
As part of the acquisition, Passport will assume the firm’s contracts and company assets, the companies said.
Passport CEO Bob Youakim said in a news released the ParkX deal will accelerate his company’s rapid growth and that Passport will continue to seek acquisition targets.
