PORT raises €14.5M to turn its courier network into autonomous delivery robots
What's the deal? PORT, a London-based logistics startup, has raised €14.5 million — a mix of equity and debt — to develop AI-powered autonomous delivery robots built on top of its existing courier network. The round was led by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD)Dealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and BalnordDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, with new and existing investors participating.
What's the endgame? Founded in 2020, PORT runs a vertically integrated urban logistics network of 24 microhubs across London, Manchester, and Birmingham, serving more than 50,000 couriers with e-bike subscriptions and charging. The new money funds a dedicated "AI Driver" that will eventually run PORT's own delivery robots. The team, now 76 strong across R&D, product, and field operations, is accelerating hiring in R&D and AI as the build-out continues.
Why now? PORT already has couriers on the streets. A portion of its 3,500-strong e-bike fleet now carries NVIDIA-powered cameras and lidar, capturing real delivery data as riders cross London — kerbs, cyclists, drop-off points, and rare edge cases.
Each newly fitted bike adds data from its first shift, letting PORT scale collection without building a separate test fleet. When a bike returns to a hub, its footage uploads automatically over the hub's fibre connection to train the AI Driver.
The raise brings total investment to €29 million, after an earlier €14.5 million across pre-Seed and Seed rounds.
What's new on the ground? PORT's 24 hubs — built into underground car parks, warehouse space, and railway arches that together repurpose roughly 52,000 sq ft of underused urban space — already give its London network 92% coverage within a mile of the Congestion Charge Zone and 60% coverage within two miles across inner London, the density PORT says its future robots will need to be stored, loaded, and charged close to delivery addresses. The company's first micro-hub outside the UK opens in Paris before the end of 2026. PORT is also lining up Royal Mail as a partner for a next-phase robotic delivery system, building on a relationship that started with cargo-bike parcel trailers added in September 2025 — PORT's bikes have since delivered more than 300,000 parcels, at roughly 90% lower emissions than an equivalent diesel-van delivery.
In their words: "We believe robotised logistics does not start with the robot; it starts with the infrastructure, operations and data required to put robotics to work in the real world," said founder and chief executive officer Kamil Suda. "We have spent years building that foundation. Now, with this investment, we are focused on the physical AI and robotics that will run on top of it."
"PORT's impressive, proven commercial operation provides the ideal foundation for the next evolution of autonomous, robotic urban infrastructure," said Ervin Luga, head of venture capital investments at EBRD. "The environmental and economic advantages of driverless delivery are well established, but the missing real-world data layer has, so far, been a prohibitive limitation."
A parallel push: The UK is also testing autonomous delivery elsewhere. Aurrigo InternationalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → secured up to £100,000 from the government-backed Freight Innovation Fund to trial its Auto-Shuttle at Portsmouth International Port — a 1km mixed-traffic route carrying people, baggage, and freight — marking its first deployment in a live UK port.
The signal: The last-mile market is shifting from standalone robot pilots toward network-led deployment, where access to existing delivery demand lowers the cost of entering new areas. PORT's courier network and its emerging Royal Mail tie-up give it a head start on deployment — but the raise alone does not yet prove the robotics themselves are commercially viable at scale.
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Image credit: Port
