Jim Gibbs, co-founder and CEO of Meter Feeder, eyes AV-driven expansion

Kevin Flynn’s escapades in the 1982 sci-fi/adventure flick Tron made such an impression on a young Jim Gibbs that it put him on the path to becoming a founder.

“‘I want to do that,’” Gibbs recalled telling his mom. “‘Whatever it was that they were doing, that’s what I want to do.’ And so my parents cashed [in] bottles and pinched pennies and dug in couch cushions. While all my other friends were going off and learning how to go camping and make fires and stuff, I went off to programming camp. And I’ve been doing it pretty much ever since.”

Gibbs’s startup, Pittsburgh-based Meter Feeder, recently marked 11 years since handling its first parking payment. The startup’s tech allows users to automatically pay for parking without cash or a credit card. Now, Gibbs and co-founder Daniel Lopretto are focused on what they see as the future of parking: helping autonomous vehicles navigate public parking with no human intervention.

“We want to make sure that they have at least the option to find parking, pay for parking, and make it a win for everyone,” Gibbs told us. “Don’t just clog up the streets because you’re trying to avoid parking.”

Revving up

Raised on Long Island, Gibbs started writing software as a child. He studied computer science at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University and then embarked on a career as a software developer, with stints at USA Today and American Eagle.

Gibbs and Lopretto, who have been developing software together for 25 years, early in their careers built a platform that handled nearly a third of mobile retail sales in the US, according to Gibbs.

“We just saw billions of dollars going through the platform, and it wasn’t affecting our bank accounts,” he said. “So we were like, ‘Hey, let’s start a business.’”

After someone suggested they build software for funeral homes, they were prepared to run with the idea. But a fortuitous lunch meeting led them in a different direction. After the person they were meeting with pulled a bunch of parking tickets out of their pocket, Gibbs and Lopretto realized that public parking could be the opportunity they were looking for. They entered a hackathon, won the top prize, and in 2015, Meter Feeder was born.

Circling the block

Gibbs pointed to Meter Feeder’s participation in the prominent angel startup accelerator Y Combinator as crucial for the young company, teaching him and Lopretto the ins and outs of running a business and opening up access to capital that wasn’t available to them early on.

“It really helped us think about the trek from being software nerds,” he said, “and learn how to actually look and think about a business and how to grow to venture scale.”

Meter Feeder also is a portfolio company of Innovation Works, an early-stage investor in Pittsburgh. As it looks to expand into new markets and focus on AVs, Meter Feeder is preparing for another fundraising round. The startup has raised $6.25 million as of November 2023, per PitchBook.

“The parking ticket stuff and the app payment, it kept us cash-neutral so that we were able to build this portion out,” Gibbs said. “But now that we’re able to see a clear way to get venture-scale returns, now it’s time for us to start looking again to raise the next round.”

Shifting gears

The Covid pandemic presented a major test for Meter Feeder, which makes money from a portion of the parking fees it collects.

“Not only were a lot of people losing their lives, but when you think about sheltering in place, there’s one thing that people are not doing,” Gibbs said. “And that’s parking—90% of all parking revenue disappeared overnight. In Pittsburgh, 8.5% of our annual budget is parking taxes. So needless to say, everyone started freaking out.”

Meter Feeder pivoted to offer fleet owners a solution to seamlessly find and pay for parking, which Gibbs said he came to understand was “a really big problem—fleets not being able to pay their parking tickets.”

Now, Meter Feeder’s focus is squarely on integrating its tech with driverless vehicles. The company, in partnership with AV software company Mapless AI, in March announced what it touted as “the first production-level, zero-human-intervention, machine-to-machine municipal parking payment in the United States.” The advancement came ahead of Waymo’s planned robotaxi launch in Pittsburgh.

AVs’ inability to pay using traditional methods creates two problems, according to Meter Feeder execs: municipalities losing out on parking revenue, and more traffic congestion due to driverless vehicles circling the block over and over again. Meter Feeder promotes its solution as a way to secure parking revenue for cities as AVs become more mainstream—and to do so without any new hardware, training, or extra steps for parking enforcers.

When an AV shifts into park, Mapless sends a message to Meter Feeder with the car’s location. Meter Feeder then charges the owner the minimum parking rate until the vehicle shifts back into drive.

Gibbs said that Meter Feeder is focused on working with municipalities and the state of Pennsylvania to help them prepare for more AVs on the road. This could be a win, he argues, not only for municipalities eager for more parking revenue, but for AV companies that are focused on reducing the cost per mile of operating their fleets.

“Being able to have three Pittsburgh organizations working together, I feel like it really shines a light on what we can get done here,” Gibbs said, referring to Meter Feeder, Mapless, and Pittsburgh’s parking authority. “We’re very comfortable moving into the bigger cities as well and trying to make somewhat of a standard so that autonomous vehicles are able to be good stewards of the road.”