In Tel Aviv, Nasty Traffic and Navigation Apps Go Hand in Hand

Tomer Neuner conceived of the Parko app when he was hunting for a parking space in Tel Aviv, circling his neighborhood on a sweltering summer day. “I thought to myself, there’s got to be a way to make the search more efficient for everyone,” says Neuner, 30, who quit his job as a product manager at financial-technology company SuperDerivatives to develop the app. Parko learns users’ habits by tracking their phones and predicts when they’re about to vacate a spot, alerting other drivers in the area. Neuner launched the app in Israel earlier this year and is planning to expand overseas, including to San Francisco and Paris.

Israel’s infrastructure problems, exemplified by Tel Aviv’s parking shortage and inadequate public transportation, has inspired some of the country’s best-known startups. In June, Google agreed to spend a reported $1.1 billion to acquire Waze, a social media mapping app featuring real-time traffic information, that was created on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. GetTaxi, which got its start in Tel Aviv before expanding internationally, has received investments of $30 million led by U.S. billionaire Len Blavatnik. “It’s the perfect combination of a place with space and transport problems and lots of companies willing to solve them,” Israeli venture capitalist Jon Medved says of Tel Aviv, which has 700 tech startups and a population of 400,000. Medved’s fund, OurCrowd, invested $350,000 in Parko.