It Started at 2am in Austin
Picture this: It's 2am on a Saturday in Austin, Texas. I walk out of a venue on 6th Street and my car is just... gone.
No sign. No warning. Just an empty parking spot and that sinking feeling in your stomach.
What followed was three hours of pure frustration. I called Austin's tow hotline — busy. I Googled "where is my towed car Austin" and got a city website that looked like it was built in 2003. I called three different impound lots. One didn't pick up. One said they don't have a search. The third told me to call back during business hours.
At 5am, sleep-deprived and furious, I finally found my car at a lot on the south side of town. $285 to get it back. And as I drove home, the engineer in me couldn't stop thinking: why is this so absurdly hard?
I'm Oretayo Fatokun — AI engineer at Microsoft and founder of Stringz Technologies. That night in Austin was the moment TowJI was born — a company I co-founded with Hicham Messaoudi, our CTO, who runs Nextis AI.
The Problem is Worse Than You Think
Here's what I discovered when I started researching:
- Every city runs its own system. Chicago has an online lookup tool. Austin has a different one. NYC splits it across multiple agencies. Some cities have nothing online at all.
- ~9 million vehicles get towed annually in the US. That's roughly one every 3.5 seconds.
- The average person spends 2-4 hours finding their towed car. Calling around, navigating broken city websites, sitting on hold.
- Towing fees increase daily. In most cities, every 24 hours your car sits in the lot adds $20-50 in storage fees. Time literally costs money.
I wrote more about the cost side of things in our 2026 towing costs breakdown, but the short version: getting towed is expensive, and every hour you waste searching makes it worse.
What TowJI Does
The core idea is simple: one search, every lot. You type in your vehicle info, and TowJI searches 200+ impound lots across major US cities and tells you where your car is.
No calling around. No navigating five different city websites. Just an answer.
We cover major metros like Austin, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and more — with new cities being added regularly.
Each city page also includes local towing rules, fee breakdowns, impound lot directories, and emergency numbers — so even if you don't run a search, the page is useful.
The Hard Part Nobody Sees
Building this was far more complex than it looks. I'll be honest — what's under the hood is something we spent a very long time getting right, and it's not something I can really talk about.
What I can say is that the towing industry in the US is incredibly fragmented. There's no central system. There's no standard. And somehow, TowJI makes it feel like there is.
The result: sub-second search times and over 90% match accuracy when a license plate is provided.
How? That's the part we're keeping to ourselves.
Growing Pains
When we launched, we covered a handful of cities. Not very useful if you're in Philadelphia. Growing coverage was a chicken-and-egg problem — we needed users to justify the effort, but we needed coverage to get users.
We focused on the top US metros first. Turns out the top 15 by population covered about 60% of all tow searches. That got us to critical mass.
Results and What I Learned
Six months after launch:
- 200+ impound lots covered across major US cities
- Average search time: 11 seconds (down from the 2-4 hour average of calling around)
- Thousands of searches per month and growing
- 93% match accuracy when license plate is provided; ~78% on make/model/color alone
The most rewarding part? The emails. People writing in at 3am saying "I just found my car in 10 seconds, thank you." That Austin experience I had — I've prevented it for thousands of other people.
What's Next
I'm working on a few things:
- Proactive alerts: Opt-in notifications if your plate shows up in our system
- More cities: Expanding beyond the US eventually
- Tow prevention: Warning people about high-risk parking areas before they get towed
Try It
If you or anyone you know gets towed, check TowJI before spending hours on the phone. It takes about 10 seconds.
You can read more about why I built it on our About page, or check out the city-specific pages for Austin, Chicago, and more.
And if you're interested in the other stuff I'm building at Stringz Technologies, come say hi.
Got towed? Don't panic. Search first → towji.com
Top comments (0)