Parkinto is built by Smartiple, a Prague AI company

Parkinto began in 2018 as an experiment by its two founders: could AI models for image recognition reliably tell which parking spaces are free? Our first answer was hardware — our own camera built on a Raspberry Pi, installed in Kutná Hora.

It taught us a lot. The Raspberry Pi of that time was not robust enough for years outdoors in heat and frost, and the glass of the camera cover kept misting up, so we drove out to wipe it clean. We realised that supplying and servicing hardware was not what we wanted to do.

So we turned it around: no hardware of our own, just a software service in the cloud that does one thing as well as possible — reads parking occupancy from an image taken by any camera, from any manufacturer — offered as SaaS. That idea became Parkinto.

The first municipal installations on existing city cameras ran from 2019, and the first marina followed in Denmark in 2021. Turning it into a resilient cloud service with its own AI training dataset took about four years. It soon became clear that Parkinto solves a real problem, and not only in the Czech Republic or only for cars. Today Parkinto runs at 22 sites in 8 countries.