A Fredericton-based parking app has been acquired by IBI Group, a Toronto-founded technology firm.
HotSpot was founded in Fredericton in 2013 and is now present in over 80 municipalities, cities, and universities across Canada. The app also has more than 460,000 users and some presence in every province.
IBI, which stands for Infrastructure, Buildings, and Intelligence, has about 60 offices worldwide.
“[HotSpot is] definitely one of the market leaders in Canada as far as parking is concerned. With respect to metrics, [it’s] probably the most used parking app in Canada,” Deepak Darda, IBI Group’s global director of innovation, told Huddle.
IBI decided to buy HotSpot after one of its start-ups, CurbIQ, kept coming in contact with the Fredericton company. Both CurbIQ and HotSpot were complementing each other.
“We are experts in traffic transport, right, it’s one of our core businesses. We have products and solutions that are in that domain, where parking payments was a wide knowledge gap and HotSpot sort of comes in and fills that gap,” said Darda.
Darda said IBI Group bought HotSpot because it’s a great fit for what they were already doing.
“Somewhere I think down the line we realized that ‘okay, well why don’t we sort of think about this a little bit more strategically and bring HotSpot as a part of IBI,’” said Darda.
Darda said IBI wants to strengthen the client base on HotSpot not only in Canada, but globally. IBI owning the organization will help it grow beyond where it currently operates.
Phillip Curley, who was HotSpot’s CEO before the acquisition, said his job is to make the right decision for the business. In this case, he said that decision was to gain a bigger team for HotSpot. He said IBI Group are experts in transportation and have influence with cities, which will help HotSpot expand.
“We have a really strong product here in New Brunswick, we should be really proud of that. But in order for us to get this in the hands of more citizens, we need a firm like IBI to push that,” said Curley.
Although the ownership of HotSpot has changed and Curley is now the head of HotSpot instead of the CEO, he said all the technology built for HotSpot is in Fredericton so the employees working for the organization will stay in their current positions.
“It’s not something you go to school for to figure out how to build…so it just makes sense to keep people working that are doing a good job right now,” said Curley.
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Darda said he wants to strengthen HotSpot operations by bringing IBI’s expertise. He said IBI Group are experts in traffic transport and have complementary products and solutions to help support the expansion of HotSpot.
“We [are] really impressed with the team. We want to definitely grow that business, so operations are going to continue under [Curley’s] leadership as far as HotSpot is concerned,” said Darda.
Darda said he wants to give Curley and his team the leverage HotSpot needs to expand their business from this point on.
Darda said HotSpot is the solution to help people park in cities. Curley said he’s looking forward to getting HotSpot into more cities and making a meaningful impact.
Jessica Saulnier is a summer intern for Huddle, an Acadia Broadcasting content partner.
