The Barcelona startup Smart Point is conquering Europe with its smart lockers for order collection, but no project starts taking over the world on the first day. Edward Hamilton installed the first lockers in office buildings in Barcelona and Madrid through his startup Lavalocker. The division he created for this new business area was called Butler, a name to which Smart Point was added when the activity became an independent company. Butler Smart Point was legally established in 2017 with Tom Selva as co-founder along with Hamilton. As the company grew based on box offices, it was renamed simply Smart Point because it was a more international name.
The entrepreneurs first focused on installing their smart lockers inside office and residential buildings. They currently have 822 clients in ten cities (Barcelona, Girona, Madrid, Seville, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Lisbon, London, Copenhagen and Utrecht).
The success of their indoor ticket offices has led Hamilton and Selva to establish a new company in 2022, which they have named Smart Point City. With this new startup, entrepreneurs go one step further by locating smart lockers on the street. They have 5,200 ticket offices between Barcelona, Girona, Madrid, Seville and Berlin. The next destinations of this network of ticket offices, which they have named IO logistics, will be Porto, Munich, Düsseldorf, Manchester, and Paris. “We want to be the leading company in the European Union in smart lockers,” in the words of Selva, who serves as executive director.
These are lockers with a universal open source system that allows them to be used by any store or courier company. In addition, the startup has entered the business incubator of the Barcelona Free Trade Zone Consortium to use 3D printing to make prototypes of the injection molds and develop the anchor that activates the ticket office. In a second phase of the project, the entrepreneurs want to robotize deliveries and use sensors to improve the process.
Based in Barcelona and a team of 64 people between Smart Point and Smart Point City, the company has reached a valuation of 40 million euros after the investment received in June from the European fund EIT Urban Mobility, an initiative of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). In total, both companies have involved an investment of five million euros to date and although they avoid giving the turnover figure, Selva assures that they are already making profits.
