Stasher raises £3m to roll out smart lockers backed by Gilion and Hive Box
This article covers Stasher, an ecommerce startup, which has closed a growth funding round of £3m to expand its luggage-storage marketplace and roll out smart lockers at hotels and travel locations across the UK and Europe. The funding aims to enable deployment of smart lockers and marketplace growth, affecting hotels, travellers and the hospitality and travel-tech ecosystem in the UK and Europe.
Stasher has closed a growth funding round of £3m to expand its luggage-storage marketplace and roll out smart lockers at hotels and travel locations across the UK and Europe. The deal combines roughly £2m in growth financing from Gilion with a strategic £983k investment from locker operator Hive Box, a partnership that ties hardware and IoT services to Stasher’s booking platform and customer demand.
Why it matters
Hotels still handle a surprising volume of manual luggage handoffs at peak arrival and departure times. Automating those interactions with smart lockers can cut repetitive front-desk work, open an off-booking revenue stream for properties and keep storage available outside staffed hours. For a labour-stretched hospitality sector, the combination of a booking marketplace and dedicated hotel lockers is a pragmatic, incremental automation play rather than a radical reinvention.
But the economics and operations matter. Lockers require visible space, ongoing maintenance, procedures for oversized or abandoned items and clear responsibility for claims and customer support. The hardware itself is unlikely to be a long-term moat: the locker operators and kiosk makers can serve multiple storage platforms, so market share will hinge on travel demand, hotel relationships and data that drives effective placement.
Inside the product
Stasher’s service lets travellers reserve and pay online, open a locker with a QR code and collect bags without a staff handover. The company says its marketplace includes more than 10,000 storage locations in over 1,200 cities, while its public site currently lists about 9,500 locations. That mix of staffed partner locations and dedicated lockers gives Stasher flexibility: hotels and shops can serve lower-volume demand, and lockers can be deployed where search and booking data show sustained need.
The Hive Box partnership brings hardware, an IoT platform and remote management. Hive Box will supply an initial 100 lockers for deployment by mid-2027 and connect its systems to Stasher’s booking platform so Stasher can focus on customer acquisition, payments and site selection.
Stasher reports bookings across its smart-locker network are growing 108% month on month and its best-performing location is generating about £2k in weekly locker revenue, a run rate that would annualise to roughly £131k. The company has not disclosed how revenue is split with property partners or the associated operating costs.
Who are the investors?
The round is split between growth financing and a strategic hardware investor. Gilion provided about £2m as growth financing targeted at expansion, while Hive Box invested £983k and is supplying the lockers and IoT integration.
The structure matters: most of the capital arrived as growth financing rather than a pure equity cheque, signalling the company is scaling an existing operating business rather than funding an unproven concept. Hive Box’s involvement reduces Stasher’s initial capital requirement for hardware and accelerates deployments, but it also ties Stasher to a third-party locker supplier that may serve other brands.
Neither investor has published an on-record quote in the announcement. The arrangement gives hotels the option to earn revenue from on-site lockers while Stasher retains control of bookings and customer experience.
If you're researching potential backers in this space:
- Explore our list of ecommerce venture capital firms in the UK
- Browse our directory of ecommerce angel investors in the UK
Founder perspective
Stasher’s leadership frames the funding as a way to accelerate hotel deployments and reduce manual handling for staff. The company points to an expanded Premier Inn rollout — from a November 2025 pilot at Premier Inn London St Pancras to installations at 17 Premier Inn properties across London, Edinburgh and Manchester — as an early validation of the hotel-focused locker model. Other hotel partners named include Zedwell Trocadero, Kula properties in Kensington and Birmingham, and Staycity Aparthotels, which uses earlier Stasher locker models.
The bigger picture
Stasher operates in a crowded market of well-funded rivals. Bounce reports more than 32,000 partner locations and is testing self-service kiosks. Radical Storage lists roughly 16,500 partners and is adding automated options through a Quadient partnership. LuggageHero focuses on hotel networks and runs a hotel-facing HotelsHero product. Quadient itself already supplied more than 1,640 UK lockers to Stasher customers in 2025, showing how locker infrastructure and booking platforms are often layered and shared.
That competitive backdrop underlines a central point: hardware alone is not a long-term differentiator. Market leadership will depend on where platforms can drive higher utilisation through data, customer flow and tight hotel integration — including property-management-system links and pre-arrival channels that make storage visible during booking.
This funding round is a small but telling example of how UK and European travel-tech investment is increasingly pairing software marketplaces with hardware partners to solve specific operational pain points. If implementations prove operationally robust and hotels see a clear revenue or labour-saving case, expect further deals that combine IoT providers with consumer-facing booking platforms.
Click here for a full list of 7,589+ startup investors in the UK