Fixed, The App That Fights Parking Tickets

Tech Crunch reports:

Fixed, the mobile app fights parking tickets on your behalf, which has been before today only available in San Francisco, is now expanding to the neighboring city of Oakland. It then plans to add on a new city at a rate of about one per month, the company says.

The startup is also announcing an additional round of $650,000 in seed funding from a number of investors including Dave Morin’s Slow Ventures, Structure VC, Paul Buchheit and rapper Nas. Combined with Fixed’s earlier round, that brings the company’s total funding to date to $1.8 million.

The idea for the Fixed mobile application is clever. Customers snap a photo of their parking ticket using their smartphone’s camera, and the app checks for a variety of common errors before writing a customized contest letter to the city on your behalf. But it does more than that, too, explains Fixed co-founder David Hegarty, the company will even tap into Google Street View to determine if the city has the proper signage in place in the area you received the ticket.

He says that Fixed home base of San Francisco hasn’t been all that receptive to the way the startup has helped automate the ticket contesting process for locals. “Over 50% of tickets have an issue or error that makes them invalid,” he explains. “But we get frustrated because the SFMTA [San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency] doesn’t play by the rules of what’s valid versus invalid. They’re a complete stickler for the rules when issuing the ticket…but they have a very lax interpretation of the rules when it comes to arbitrating disputes,” he laments.

Fighting back against the monopoly.