€14.5m · Other round · Transportation · London, UK
London-based urban logistics company PORT has raised a €14.5m mixed equity-and-debt round led by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and Balnord, with existing and new investors also participating. Tech.eu reports that the financing doubles PORT's total funding to €29m after earlier pre-seed and seed rounds.
The capital will support PORT's AI Driver, autonomous delivery vehicles and hiring across R&D and AI, while part of the mixed financing will continue to fund its established e-bike rental operation. The company is preparing a robotic parcel-delivery system with Royal Mail, and founder and CEO Kamil Suda told Tech Funding News that its first robot is expected to deploy in the coming months.
Courier operations become training infrastructure
PORT started with the operating layer around last-mile work: e-bike rentals, charging, hubs and fleet software. Its own site lists more than 50,000 couriers, 24-plus hubs and more than 4m kilometres ridden per month. That installed base now gives the robotics programme something a standalone vehicle developer would have to build separately: recurring street coverage and places to store, charge and dispatch machines.
Some bikes carry NVIDIA-powered cameras and lidar to collect London delivery data, which is uploaded at the hubs and used to train PORT's AI Driver. Suda told Tech Funding News that faces and registration plates are blurred on-device before the data enters PORT's system. The commercial logic is that ordinary courier shifts can produce training examples without a separate mapping fleet, while the rental business continues serving paying users.
The network may be harder to copy than the robot
PORT operates around 3,500 e-bikes from hubs in London, Manchester and Birmingham. The hubs occupy underused sites such as car parks, warehouses and railway arches, placing charging and dispatch capacity close to delivery demand. That proximity matters because an autonomous vehicle still needs loading, storage, maintenance and rapid access to its service area.
Suda expects delivery hardware and parts of the autonomy stack to become more standardised. If that happens, PORT's defensibility will rest less on the shape of its first robot and more on the density of its hubs, the data gathered through real routes and its ability to win parcel volume. The Royal Mail deployment is therefore an important test: it must show that the existing courier network can lower the cost and time required to move from fleet data to reliable robotic service.
Sources checked:
PORT product site · Tech.eu reporting · Tech Funding News interview · Tech.eu Funding Explorer
