Evan Vitale Consulting: BMW-backed valet startup, Zirx, kills off consumer business to focus on enterprise

Zirx, perhaps the second-most hyped startup in the we’ll park your car nook of the tech industry (see: Luxe), announced today that it plans to shut down its consumer business at the end of the month.

The BMW-backed company, however, isn’t going away completely. Zirx writes that it “made the tough choice to close our consumer valet parking service on February 29th, so we can focus all our energy on our enterprise business.” That enterprise business, apparently, “is growing, successful and requires more and more resources from us,” the company wrote.

Zirx has raised more than $36 million to date.

So there you have it: Yet another (consumer-focused) on-demand service bites the dust.

The company’s announcement, in full:

We started ZIRX with an aim to make car ownership and parking way better. Over the past year, we’ve parked hundreds of thousands of cars and have also built a successful enterprise business that’s growing quickly. We’ve learned a lot, but three things in particular stand out:

Consumer on-demand parking, while one of those novel, amazing experiences for customers, is a very difficult business to scale. And, an even harder business to scale to great profitability.
Our enterprise business is growing, successful and requires more and more resources from us.
Without unlimited resources, it’s really, really hard to build both a great consumer (B2C) and a great enterprise (B2B) business at the same time.
For these reasons, we’ve made the tough choice to close our consumer valet parking service on February 29th, so we can focus all our energy on our enterprise business.

We’re excited about our new direction and are entering the next phase of ZIRX with a great team, supportive investors, and a laser focus.

—

To our customers:

Our entire team sincerely thanks you for your business and for taking a chance on us as we reimagined what parking could be. We hope we made your lives easier, one park at a time, and that you’ll be able to find an alternate solution quickly.

ZIRX will operate as normal until the end of the month. Monday, February 29th, is the last day you can use ZIRX and monthly passes will automatically end at 9pm PT that night.

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