Exclusive: Metropolis appoints new CFO as AI company nears $5 billion valuation
Good morning. An AI-powered urban infrastructure may be on the horizon.
“The future is one where transactions happen automatically, powered by AI, and that’s the future we’re building for,” Lookman Olusanya, the new CFO of Metropolis, told me.
Metropolis is an AI company enabling checkout-free payment experiences. Olusanya, who will join the company on June 30, most recently served as a CFO of Square, a company of Block. He previously held financial leadership roles at Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
According to reports, Metropolis is currently fundraising at a valuation approaching $5 billion. The company has streamlined “drive in, drive out” ticketless parking by automating vehicle recognition and payments using computer vision and AI. There’s no need to pull a ticket, scan a code, or wait in line at a machine.
Metropolis’ platform now serves over 50 million customers, processes $5 billion in annual transaction volume, and adds 35,000 new members daily. However, the company’s AI capabilities are expanding beyond parking solutions.
“The chance to architect the financial foundation of a company that’s redefining how people access and interact with the physical world, starting with mobility, was just impossible to pass up,” Olusanya said.
He also joined Metropolis because he believes in its team and founders. “There’s ambition and courage to create an entirely new category, and I wanted to help build that,” he said. “Frankly, I haven’t been this excited about a company since my early days helping build up Amazon Web Services.”
Los Angeles-based Metropolis, founded in 2017 by CEO Alex Israel, Peter Fisher, Courtney Fukuda, and Travis Kell, who previously served as CFO, acquired SP Plus last year for approximately $1.5 billion. The deal was financed by $1.8 billion in funding led by Eldridge and 3L, taking SP Plus private and making Metropolis the largest parking operator in North America.
Olusanya describes Metropolis as building something visionary at the intersection of infrastructure, real estate, payments, and AI. The goal is to bring seamless, checkout-free transactions to life across retail, hospitality, refueling, and security. In January, the company acquired Oosto (formerly AnyVision) for $125 million. Oosto develops facial recognition and biometric technologies used in industries like health care, retail, and gaming.
Olusanya has spent the past two decades scaling high-growth businesses across cloud infrastructure, payments, and SaaS, leading finance and strategy at Square, Google Cloud, and AWS. He began his career at American Airlines.
That journey, he said, has taught him how to build at scale, drive discipline, allocate capital, unify fragmented systems, and translate metrics into enterprise value.
“At Metropolis, I expect to bring that same operating rigor and investor readiness, paired with a builder’s mindset,” he said. As he steps into the CFO role, Olusanya has three priorities: listen and learn; grow the company’s financial systems with AI automation and precision analytics; and build the next chapter for Metropolis.
That includes creating a native AI finance organization that is nimble, deeply integrated with the business, and has AI at its core. “That’s my vision,” he said.
Olusanya is based in Seattle. When he’s not strategizing as CFO, you’ll find him outdoors hiking or kayaking.
Have a good weekend. See you on Monday.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com