Born from a very boring problem
In 2024, our founder spent 11 minutes trying to exit a parking garage in downtown Chicago. Machine was broken. Card wouldn't read. Attendant wasn't there. Standing in the rain, late for a meeting.
That night, he started researching license plate recognition technology. It turned out the cameras were already cheap and accurate enough to solve the problem. What was missing was the software layer tying it together — the member database, the payment processing, the gate integration.
Six months later, Tooru was running its first pilot. We didn't stop there. We proved the model in Chicago, then expanded to Sydney, Toronto, and Vancouver. Today we're live across the US, Canada, and Australia — with 5,000+ members who never touch a ticket machine.
The same frustrating problem exists in every city in every country. A busted ticket machine looks the same in a initial pilot location and a Sydney CBD car park. The solution is identical everywhere. That's why we've moved fast across markets.
We're a small, focused team. We move fast. We're honest about where we are. And we're building something that genuinely makes people's days better — one parking lot at a time, in every city on earth.