UNSW Founder 10x alumni Share with Oscar is one of the 51 companies awarded the Federal Government’s Boosting Female Founders Grant, securing over $320,000 in funding.
Selected from over 2,200 women-led businesses that applied for the grant, the funding will support a national expansion of the real time on-demand platform that unlocks access to vacant car spaces in cities.
“This grant will allow us to focus on enabling the technology for market entry, and marketing activities for sustained growth,” says UNSW alumni Lisa Qi, co-founder of Share with Oscar.
Founded by Lisa Qi and Louise Chen, Share with Oscar is a platform for sharing and booking parking spaces.
The founders started with a handful of residents sharing their driveways and garages around Bondi Beach and around the UNSW campus, and have since grown significantly across New South Wales to thousands of residents and businesses sharing their parking spaces on the platform.
Share with Oscar was impacted by COVID and city-wide lockdowns, which saw significant setbacks to their plans for 2020. Nevertheless, the business saw great astonishing recovery with the increased use in private vehicles over public transport, and flexible working increasing the demand for casual, on demand parking.
During the pandemic, the founders launched a successful appeal to those who lived nearby to hospitals to make their parking spaces available to healthcare workers to park in for free.
The team has also been focused on supporting the hotel and tourism sector which has been devastated by COVID, by working with Hotels to let out their parking to the public as supplementary income.
As mentors for the UNSW New Wave program, both Qi and Chen are also passionate about giving back by supporting and empowering women and future female entrepreneurs and even growing their own team by recruiting like-minded women
The Boosting Female Founders Grant recognises the challenges female entrepreneurs face in accessing capital. Twelve million dollars in grant funding has been provided to female-led businesses in this pilot round. A further $36M has been pledged to the program over the next five years.