London-based Orbiri has raised £320,000 in an oversubscribed angel round with 14 individual investors, following an initial £45,000 in seed funding. The company is preparing to launch a community-wide solution that aligns children, parents, and schools around shared digital limits (shifting peer pressure from a barrier to a support) instead of relying on parents to police screen time individually or enforce blanket smartphone bans.

Orbiri provides a community-powered platform with preset, considered screen-time boundaries for children. Its collective-action approach aligns children, parents, and schools around shared boundaries to eliminate daily device battles and protect the conditions necessary for healthy childhood development. Rather than leaving schools and families to act alone, it enables coordinated limits within a single framework, aiming to make healthy digital habits the norm.

Amid growing concern about children’s unrestricted smartphone use, with schools in England adopting phone bans and ministers considering Australia-style limits on under-16s’ social media, Orbiri contends that durable progress depends on bottom-up community coordination rather than top-down restrictions.

Set to roll out next year, Orbiri will complete product development, secure compliance certifications, and run trials with early-adopter schools while expanding its core and product teams.

The goal is to demonstrate that shared community boundaries can replace daily device conflicts with a more natural shift toward healthier technology use, addressing shortcomings of school bans and individual parental controls.

The funding will support upcoming trial phases ahead of a broader launch, aligning with a growing view that approaches such as school phone bans and individual parental controls are insufficient and difficult to implement at scale.

SLNG.ai, a speech infrastructure startup out of Barcelona building the first radically global platform for voice AI, today announced it has raised €3.3 million in pre-Seed funding to challenge the US-centric voice technology ecosystem that “has left billions of users worldwide in digital silence.“

The round, led by Earlybird VC, will accelerate SLNG’s plan to provide developers, startups, and enterprises with a unified platform that integrates multiple speech models, supports true global deployment with regional compliance, and eliminates the barriers that have kept voice technology concentrated in a handful of languages and markets.

According to Luke Miller, CEO and Co-founder of SLNG: “We’re not just building another voice AI platform, we are rethinking the entire ecosystem to be developer first, truly global and compliant.“

The pre-Seed round raised by SLNG reflects growing investor attention in Europe’s voice and speech technology sector during 2025.

The landscape includes funding rounds such as Vox AI’s €7.5 million Seed to expand multilingual voice assistants for quick-service restaurants, Synthflow AI’s €17.2 million Series A for enterprise-grade voice agents, and Solda.AI’s €3.5 million Seed for telesales automation.

Other adjacent raises include Augmented Hearing’s €3 million Seed for speech enhancement and MEGA’s €1.7 million pre-Seed to build compliant AI voice agents.

Against this backdrop, SLNG’s Barcelona base makes it one of the few Spanish entrants in the voice infrastructure field, contrasting with Northern European dominance in voice agents.

Unlike peers that build application-level conversational systems, SLNG focuses on model-agnostic voice infrastructure, offering developer tools to integrate multiple speech models and maintain regional compliance. The raise positions SLNG as an early mover in the foundational layer of Europe’s speech ecosystem – complementary to, rather than competing directly with, voice agent startups driving the broader 2025 funding trend.

“What excites us about SLNG is the audacity of their mission: to make voice AI universal, compliant, and developer-first from day one. Luke and the team are not just building a product – they’re building the missing infrastructure for a truly global voice ecosystem. We believe SLNG can define the next era of speech technology,“ added Akash Bajwa, Principal at Earlybird VC.

SLNG was founded in 2025 by Ismael Ordaz and Luke Miller. Ordaz leads product and engineering, while Miller scales GTM like he did at companies like npm and Vercel. Having seen speech AI break beyond US borders: models failing on dialects, compliance blocking markets and costs spiraling out of control, they built SLNG to “unmute the world”.

The startup was founded to address repeated patterns that companies continuously struggle with:

1. Lack of regional compute
2. Missing industry-specific models
3. Compliance barriers
4. Latency issues

According to SLNG, most platforms optimise primarily for premium languages like English, Spanish, and French, leaving other languages/dialects as afterthoughts. High latency and data residency issues entangle deployment in many non-US centric regions.

Developers are forced into single-provider ecosystems with limited flexibility in terms of cost and model testing. Lastly, regulated industries can’t deploy voice AI products due to data sovereignty requirements that existing platforms simply can’t meet.

Unlike traditional speech AI providers, SLNG offers a model-agnostic platform where developers integrate any speech-to-text, text-to-speech, or voice cloning model through a single API.

The company’s open ecosystem approach lets developers combine open-source and proprietary models without vendor lock-in, while developer-first design delivers SDKs and APIs built for rapid integration. This avoids months-long implementations, giving developers unprecedented flexibility in building voice-enabled applications.

The platform already supports deployment across over 20 regions, enabling companies in regulated industries, like healthcare, finance, and government, to finally deploy voice AI while meeting strict data residency requirements.

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SLNG.ai, the speech infrastructure startup building the first radically global platform for voice AI, today announced it has raised €3.3 million in Pre-Seed funding to challenge the US-centric voice technology ecosystem that has left billions of users worldwide in digital silence.

The round, led by Earlybird VC, will accelerate SLNG's mission to restore the universal power of voice by providing developers, startups, and enterprises with a unified platform that integrates multiple speech models, supports true global deployment with regional compliance, and eliminates the barriers that have kept voice technology concentrated in a handful of languages and markets.

Spain-based SLNG was founded by Ismael Ordaz and Luke Miller after spotting the same pattern globally: companies struggling with 1) lack of regional compute, 2) missing industry-specific models, 3) compliance barriers, and 4) latency issues. SLNG solves all four.  According to Luke Miller, CEO and co-founder of SLNG:

“We're not just building another voice AI platform, we are rethinking the entire ecosystem to be developer first, truly global and compliant."

SLNG aims to solve fundamental limitations of the current voice AI infrastructure. Most platforms optimise primarily for premium languages like English, Spanish, and French, leaving other languages/dialects as afterthoughts.

High latency and data residency issues entangle deployment in many non-US-centric regions. Developers are forced into single-provider ecosystems with limited flexibility in terms of cost and model testing. Lastly, regulated industries can't deploy voice AI products due to data sovereignty requirements that existing platforms simply can't meet.

Unlike traditional speech AI providers, SLNG offers a model-agnostic platform where developers integrate any speech-to-text, text-to-speech, or voice cloning model through a single API. This fuels a truly global deployment through regional infrastructure and ensures low latency and compliance worldwide.

The company's open ecosystem approach lets developers combine open-source and proprietary models without vendor lock-in, while developer-first design delivers SDKs and APIs built for rapid integration. This avoids months-long implementations, giving developers unprecedented flexibility in building voice-enabled applications.

The platform already supports deployment across over 20 regions, enabling companies in regulated industries, like healthcare, finance, and government, to finally deploy voice AI while meeting strict data residency requirements.

“What excites us about SLNG is the audacity of their mission: to make voice AI universal, compliant, and developer-first from day one. Luke and the team are not just building a product - they’re building the missing infrastructure for a truly global voice ecosystem. We believe SLNG can define the next era of speech technology, “ added Akash Bajwa, Principal at Earlybird VC.

Rome-based SpaceTech startup Titan4 has closed a €4 million Series A round to advance its Earth Intelligence platform, which integrates satellite data, ground sensors and AI-powered analytics to monitor the condition of critical infrastructure.

The round was led by CDP Venture Capital, through the Infratech sector of the Corporate Partners I fund, together with Vertis, through the Vertis Venture 6 Digital South fund – partly co-financed by the European Union, NextGenerationEU.

For Giovanni Quacquarelli, Founder and CEO of Titan4, this round represents not only a financial goal, but also a step that has strengthened the company strategy: “This round represents a turning point for us: not only a financial goal, but also a path of comparison that has strengthened our strategic vision. The trust of partners such as CDP Venture Capital and Vertis allows us to accelerate technological development and aspire to an international role, building increasingly effective Earth Intelligence tools to support the security and resilience of critical infrastructures”. (Translated)

Titan4’s Series A aligns with a broader 2025 European funding trend focused on Earth intelligence, satellite infrastructure, and resilience technologies.

Several DeepTech peers have recently attracted investment, including Belgium’s EDGX (€2.3 million Seed for onboard AI compute), France’s UNIVITY (€31 million to advance satellite-enabled 5G), Look Up (€50 million for radar-based orbital safety), and the UK’s Spaceflux (€6.1 million to expand its satellite-tracking network). Germany’s OroraTech (€37 million for wildfire and climate monitoring) and the UK’s Messium (€3.8 million for satellite-driven precision agriculture) further illustrate investor confidence in AI-enhanced geospatial analytics.

Within this context, Titan4’s raise is notable as one of the few Italian-based ventures in the SpaceTech and Earth observation sector, underscoring both national progress in the field and a Europe-wide push toward AI-enabled infrastructure safety and climate resilience.

“We decided to invest in Titan4 because we believe in the solidity of their vision and in the ability of the team to translate it into a concrete industrial impact. The technology they are developing allows those who design, manage and maintain infrastructures to make more informed and timely decisions, guaranteeing a strategic contribution to the security of the territories and the competitiveness of our country,” added Claudio Bruno, Senior Investment Manager of the Corporate Partners I fund of CDP Venture Capital.

Founded in 2019, Titan4 has developed an Earth Intelligence solution that integrates satellite data, information from ground sensors and climate models, processed using AI algorithms. This makes it possible to analyse the state of infrastructure – from bridges to dams, to water, energy and transport networks – and to identify anomalies, criticalities and changes.

The company provides managers, institutions and operators with advanced tools to allegedly anticipate risks, optimise operational decisions, reduce costs and strengthen the security and resilience of communities.

The funding follows the Seed investment made in 2023 by Galaxia, the National Aerospace Technology Transfer Pole, born on the initiative of the Technology Transfer Fund of CDP Venture Capital together with Obloo Ventures.

The new resources will allow the startup to consolidate its presence on the national market, accelerate research and development activities and initiate international expansion, with the aim of positioning itself as a global leader in support of infrastructure safety and resilience.

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Revolut, the British FinTech leader with more than 65 million customers worldwide, today announced the strategic acquisition of Berlin’s Swifty, an AI-powered travel agent startup and 2023 FutureTravel Pitch Competition finalist.

This acquisition brings Swifty’s proprietary AI technology and Co-founders to Revolut, where they will focus on enhancing the company’s loyalty and lifestyle products for its global customer base.

Stanislav Bondarenko and Tomasz Przedmojski, Co-founders of Swifty commented: “We’re excited to bring the power of Swifty to tens of millions of Revolut users. Joining forces with one of the world’s leading FinTechs is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to scale our vision globally and enhance the lifestyle of over 65 million customers. Together, we’ll build an AI concierge that not only simplifies travel but anticipates everyday needs across all aspects of life.“

The Revolut acquisition of Swifty aligns with a broader 2025 trend across Europe where travel, mobility, and lifestyle startups are increasingly integrating AI to bridge finance and travel experiences.

In 2025, Exoticca in Spain raised €25 million to enhance its AI-driven trip-planning capabilities, while WeTravel secured €78 million to automate workflows for multi-day travel operators. Denmark’s Tryp.com raised €3.1 million to refine its AI-based travel planning engine, and France’s Kolet closed €8.6 million to expand global connectivity services for travellers. In Germany, Circula secured €15 million to advance its AI-powered expense management tools, overlapping finance and travel functions.

Collectively, these developments show how FinTech and TravelTech are converging – with Revolut’s integration of Swifty exemplifying how financial platforms are extending into lifestyle and travel through applied AI.

Christopher Guttridge, Head of Loyalty at Revolut, says: “This acquisition strengthens our position at the intersection of finance, AI and lifestyle. Through this move we’re gaining both talent and expertise in AI driven travel solutions, which will help us deliver even more personalised and seamless experiences to our customers.”

Founded in 2023 originally incubated at Lufthansa Innovation Hub (LIH), Swifty is an AI assistant that autonomously manages essential steps of business travel, encompassing planning, booking, payment, and invoicing, all within the chat interface, helping travellers book their business trips in 5 minutes via chat.

This acquisition complements Revolut’s development of its AI financial assistant, building on the lifestyle offering. Swifty’s AI agent will enable a powerful customer experience that combines smart financial guidance with the automated execution of complex travel and lifestyle tasks.

Swifty was also part of the 2023 FutureTravel Pitch Competition featuring 10 promising early-stage travel startups on a global scale. Swifty, along with the other nine startups, competed for the title of FutureTravel startup of the year and a prize package valued at €56k. To learn more about the FutureTravel Summit and this year’s edition, click here.

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Christopher Savoie, one of the original inventors behind the AI system that led to Apple’s Siri, has raised over €2M for SiC Systems, a startup combining agentic AI and quantum sensing technologies for use in critical industrial and defence applications.

The full amount raised has not been disclosed.

The company is a spinout from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). The round was led by Dutch quantum investment fund QDNL Participations, with additional backing from Propagator Ventures, Plug and Play, and Wavepeak Ventures.

SiC Systems aims to develop intelligent, adaptive AI agents capable of orchestrating complex physical systems in real time. Its proprietary platform integrates classical and quantum sensors with agent-based AI and generative models to support decision-making in high-stakes sectors such as biomanufacturing, industrial automation, and defence.

Savoie, who co-founded the company with DTU professor Seyed Soheil Monsouri, said:
"From the early multiagent natural language interfaces that brought Siri to life to today's agentic AI for the physical worlds of industrial and defense applications, my personal AI journey has always been about making intelligence actionable."

QDNL Participations Investment Director Kris Kaczmarek said: "SiC's fusion of agentic AI and quantum innovation represents a leap forward for mission-critical applications."

Founded across Copenhagen and Nashville, SiC Systems builds on DTU research in model-based tools for dynamic, multi-scale systems. The company’s quantum-inspired virtual sensors aim to reduce reliance on costly hardware by predicting physical states with high precision, even in harsh conditions.

The startup plans to use the funding to scale its platform, form strategic partnerships, and pilot deployments across the chemical, biological manufacturing, energy, and defence sectors.

Oura, the Finnish health tech startup known for its popular smart rings, has raised over $900m in a new funding round, valuing the startup at “approximately $11bn”, it said.

The funding round was led by Fidelity Management & Research Company with participation from new investor ICONIQ and investment from Whale Rock and Atreides. 

Oura's valuation has now more than doubled since its $200m last funding round in December last year, valuing it at $5.2bn.

Oura says it will funnel the new funding to speed up AI and product innovation, expand global distribution and invest in the development of new health features.

Oura says it has sold more than 5.5 million Oura rings since they were launched in 2015, with more than half of those sales in the past year.

The startup says it recorded revenues of more than $500m in 2024, and says it’s on track to top $1bn in sales for 2025.

“This new funding is a testament to the strength of Oura’s business and the trust millions of members place in us every day,” said Tom Hale, chief executive officer, Oura.

“We’re proud to be building not just a product, but a global movement toward proactive health—helping people understand their bodies, make better lifestyle decisions, and connect more effectively with their healthcare providers.

"Today, our technology supports consumers, employers, insurers, and clinicians working together to advance preventive health at scale. With this investment, we will accelerate innovation, expand our global reach, and set a new standard for what wearables can achieve in advancing preventive health.”

David Shuman, Oura board chair, said: "Oura’s growth and impact over the past year have been truly remarkable.

“The company has doubled revenue, expanded its global reach, and delivered transformative solutions that are reshaping the wearables industry."

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Strawberry, an agentic browser with built-in, personalised AI companions, has raised $6 million led by General Catalyst and EQT Ventures, with participation from founders of Lovable, Supabase, and Hugging Face.

While enterprises often deploy AI via large budgets and multi-year programs, freelancers, startups, and small businesses need tools that work immediately. Many existing solutions require technical expertise, disrupt workflows, or sit in standalone interfaces outside the browser.

Strawberry embeds AI directly into browsing to create a no-code, adaptive workspace that automates routine digital work so people can focus on higher-value tasks.

Founded in Stockholm by a technical team focused on bringing AI beyond developers, Strawberry streamlines tab switching, data movement across tools, spreadsheet population, and message drafting, while adapting to each user’s context and workflows.

Early users have built custom assistants for competitive intelligence and sales prospecting, earning Product Hunt “Product of the Day” and “Product of the Week.” The platform signals a shift from generic enterprise AI toward personalised companions that make everyday work more collaborative and usable.

Charles Maddock, CEO and co-founder of Strawberry, commented: 

The browser is a tool most people use daily and know intimately. By giving Strawberry powerful AI features out of the box, we're making AI automation accessible to everyone. This funding helps us continue our mission to help modern workers love what they do and skip their busywork.

The financing will fuel Strawberry's expansion across engineering and design to support rapid iteration with its growing beta community.

Alongside the financing, the company is rolling out an upgraded version with new features, offering early access to select customers and expanding onboarding monthly.

Stockholm-based Epiminds, which develops multi-agent AI systems to run marketing end-to-end, emerged from stealth with $6.6 million in funding. The funding was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from EWOR, Entourage, and high-profile angels, including the former CMO of Booking.com.

Agencies face pressure from both clients and operations as clients expect greater transparency, faster reporting, and measurable ROI on tighter budgets, while internally, fragmented data slows decisions, and AI adoption is uncertain. Traditional responses like hiring more specialists, adding dashboards, or reacting after problems arise raise costs and complexity without fixing core inefficiencies or preparing for the future. Epiminds addresses these issues.

Founded in 2025 by Google and Spotify alums, Elias Malm and Mo Elkhidir, respectively, the company builds multi-agent AI systems that agencies can train and evolve. Its core product is Lucy, an AI marketing manager coordinating over 20 specialised agents across reporting, optimisation, budget pacing, bidding, and creative.

Agencies can onboard a client in under 30 seconds and immediately deploy an AI team to run campaigns end-to-end. Lucy and team not only surface insights but execute them, learn each agency’s playbooks, and proactively monitor accounts to flag risks before performance declines.

According to Mo Elkhidir, marketers are increasingly expected to achieve more with fewer resources:

Lucy and her team take on the busywork so that marketing talent can do their best work. This is not about replacing creativity; it’s about giving it room to flourish.

Agencies using Epiminds report faster onboarding, improved performance, reduced wasted spend, and more time for creative and strategic work. The multi-agent system manages routine tasks such as reporting and pacing, as well as audits, creative analysis, competitive insights, and strategic planning. By linking insights to execution across platforms, Lucy can increase output without additional headcount.

The product targets a gap in the market. Legacy dashboards and optimisers are siloed and manual, while point AI tools address narrow problems without coordination. Epiminds’ multi-agent approach provides an integrated, adaptive system that learns and improves over time.

Elias Malm added:

Our vision is simple. We're building Epiminds because we see where marketing is headed. The future is about dynamic, agentic teams that analyse, plan, execute, and improve in real time. Every marketer should have access to a 24/7 AI workforce that frees up their time for creativity and strategy. Our goal is to give them that future, today.

Looking ahead, Epiminds plans to expand Lucy’s capabilities across more integrations, increase the level of autonomy, and self-improving capabilities. Each new feature strengthens the entire system, creating a network effect where every agency benefits from smarter, more capable AI.

London’s Spex Capital, a leading early-stage investor tackling global healthcare challenges through HealthTech solutions, today announced the first €30 million commitment to its flagship €100 million Venture HealthTech Fund.

The fund will invest globally in early-stage HealthTech startups, from Seed to Series A/B, with investments of up to €5 million.

Spex has partnered with EIT Digital and Penn Medicine/LGH, a leading mutli-hospital health system in the US that handles over 7 million patients each year.

Claudio D’Angelo, Founder and CEO of Spex Capital, said: “Healthcare faces immense challenges worldwide with ageing populations creating growing patient demand and systemic cost pressures. Our true strength is not just the volume of companies we see, but the unparalleled power of our distribution network to provide them with essential commercial and clinical validation.”

Several other funds have also entered or expanded within the European healthtech investment space in 2025, indicating sustained investor appetite for early-stage digital health and medical innovation.

London-based Meridian Health Ventures launched a €44.7 million transatlantic fund to back HealthTech startups scaling between the UK and the United States. Belgium’s Capricorn Partners announced a €51 million first close for its Health-Tech Fund II, targeting diagnostics, digital health, and life-science ventures. In France, M2care secured €26 million to accelerate venture studio activity in healthcare innovation.

Against this backdrop, Spex Capital’s €100 million Venture HealthTech Fund sits among the largest of the current European initiatives focused on early-stage health technology, highlighting growing institutional confidence in the sector’s potential.

Its partnerships with EIT Digital, Penn Medicine, and long-standing links to the NHS provide access to extensive validation networks, a factor often cited as a bottleneck in scaling health technologies.

In a year where European healthtech investment surpassed €4 billion in early 2025, according to EU-Startups’ sector overview, Spex Capital’s entry signals sustained investor confidence in digital health and medical innovation.

“The supply is strong, but the validation we deliver through our network is the game-changer. Digital HealthTech is key to addressing these challenges, and with this fund, our new partnerships, and a world-class advisory network, we are uniquely positioned to support visionary founders delivering transformative solutions worldwide,” added D’Angelo.

Founded in 2021 by serial entrepreneur Claudio D’Angelo, Spex Capital focuses on commercialising and scaling digital health and medical technology solutions across major healthcare delivery systems worldwide.

The company also announced the appointment of Lord Markham, former UK Health Minister, as Chair of the Board. He has extensive experience across the public, private and voluntary sectors, particularly in the venture space where he co-founded a HealthTech business, Cignpost, which grew from €0 to €350 million turnover in 1 year.

Lord Markham, Chairman, said: ”I’m delighted to join Spex Capital at such a pivotal moment for HealthTech. This scale-up fund will unleash groundbreaking startups. I look forward to working with Claudio and the team as we accelerate the development and adoption of technologies that improve patient outcomes and reshape healthcare delivery globally. “

EU-Startups previously covered the firm in February 2023, when Spex Capital first announced plans for its €100 million HealthTech fund.

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London-based Clove, a new challenger in personal finance and wealth management, has emerged from stealth with a $14 million pre-seed round led by Accel. The round also saw participation from Kindred Capital, Air Street Capital, and angels, including Barney Hussey-Yeo (Cleo), Patrick Pichette (via Inovia Capital), Erez Mathan (GoCardless), and Gideon Valkin (ex-Monzo, ClearScore).

The FCA estimates that people who receive financial advice may be up to 10 per cent wealthier in subsequent years than those who do not. To narrow the advice gap and support market growth, it has introduced regulatory changes to encourage investment and innovation.

In the UK, 13 million mass-affluent individuals hold £3.8 trillion in investable assets, including more than 3.7 million open to professional advice with over £50,000 to invest; a further 7 million adults with £10,000+ in cash savings may be missing out on long-term investing benefits.

Clove is building a financial institution for how people live and work today, aiming to make money management and advice accessible, affordable, and personal. The company combines human advisers with AI to scale high-quality, personalised guidance and automate administrative work, helping to close the advice gap.

Co-founder and CPO Alex Loizou said everyone should have access to high-quality financial advice. He added that Clove aims to reshape the economics of advice by combining human expertise with AI to make planning more accessible, affordable, and effective for young professionals, entrepreneurs, growing families, and those beginning to plan for retirement.

Clove will use the pre-seed funding to expand its team and platform ahead of a planned full launch in 2026, subject to FCA authorisation. 

Sometimes the most compelling startup ideas are born from simple, everyday problems that demand a tech-first fix. Take two UK founders who bootstrapped through COVID and are now the global leader in the highly competitive space of luggage storage. UK startup Stasher.

During COVID, they built systems that now onboard hundreds of locations monthly without meetings.  They've expanded from 1,000 to over 8,000 locations across more than 1,000 cities and 80 countries, and hit profitability during the summer and 100 per cent YoY growth, while their US competitors (like Bounce, backed by a16z) burn through much more cash. I

I spoke with founders Jacob Wedderburn-Day and Anthony Collias to learn how they did it, and ultimately how UK founders can still build category leaders without following the Silicon Valley playbook. 

From student flat to global platform

The business started when students kept knocking on the co-founder's King's Cross door, asking to store bags for the summer holidays. 

According to Collias, after uni, he was living between Euston and King’s Cross, and Wedderburn-Day was still at UCL, which had a startup programme. 

They’d both realised they didn’t really want to go into corporate graduate schemes — Wedderburn-Day had done a stint with the government and had a job offer from the Bank of England. 

Collias recalled: 

“I’d done an investment-banking internship and hated it — long hours, smart people doing boring work. At the time, I was living with my brother, who was at City University. 

Between us and our friends, people were always asking, ‘Can I leave my stuff at yours for a couple of weeks?’ You know, getting kicked out of student halls, going travelling, that sort of thing. Jake would often leave his bag with me, too.” 

The duo decided to put the idea in the UCL’s Hatchery startup incubator program. 

Refining the model: from homes to hotels

The duo took some time refining their idea.

Wedderburn-Day shared:

“At the beginning, it was kind of 'Airbnb for storage.’ You could store your stuff in someone’s house for a day, a week, or a month. But we soon realised that was a bad idea — too much friction for what you could charge.

We also realised everyone was using it as left luggage, not self-storage. They just wanted to leave their bags for a few hours or a day, not months. We didn’t know how to price one day versus one month — they were completely different things.”

So they narrowed it down to same-day storage, and saw it made more sense to work with local businesses. 

According to Wedderburn-Day, “they were already open, had spare space, and liked having people come in.  “That’s how the business model evolved — from 'store anything anywhere' to a clear left-luggage service run through shops and hotels.”

Scaling through marketing and digital infrastructure

Left-luggage offerings are nothing new - walk through any tourist precinct and you’ll see stores offering left luggage services.

But according to Collias, “a lot of those standalone locker stores — especially in places like Barcelona or Madrid — are becoming oversaturated."

"Ten or twenty years ago, if you opened the first few, you made a killing. But now, in some cities, there are 40 or 50 of them, and the economics don’t add up.

Most of those operators aren’t experts in online marketing, and it’s not worth running ads for just one or two locations."

Stasher has developed a platform that connects travellers with trusted storage spots — including hotels, shops, and lockers — across cities worldwide, allowing them to drop off their luggage for a few hours or several days. One thing they discovered is that 90 per cent of luggage storage is booked on the same day, making it on-demand urban logistics rather than planned infrastructure.

With Stasher, users can easily search, book, and pay online for a convenient storage location for specific dates and times through the website. Once booked, travellers simply “stash” their bags at the chosen location and collect them later. 

In addition to short-term storage, Stasher also offers a luggage shipping service, enabling users to send their bags directly to their next destination. Collias contendst:

“We can solve a lot of the problems those small storage shops face. They have the physical presence; we have the digital infrastructure. Combine the two and you get real synergy.”

Further, he asserts that platforms like Slasher have the advantage because we can spread the marketing costs across hundreds of sites. For customers, that means more choice — they can compare all the nearby options instead of relying on chance.”

Winning in a crowded market

Wedderburn-Day shared that to win in a crowded market, “You have to nail three things: product, price, and distribution.”

“Product is tricky because you’re working with fragmented partners — shops, hotels, different setups — but smart lockers are helping with consistency.

We also like hotels because they’re used to handling guests’ belongings professionally. Our pricing strategy aims to be the best-value option.

Lockers have to maximise revenue per square metre, but we can offer lower prices and still profit thanks to scale.”

Data-driven expansion

Stasher is now active in about a thousand towns across cities globally. Early on, it picked places based on search volumes, tourism, and common sense — “like, obviously, downtown New York will have demand.” But another metric is Airbnb density.

According to Wedderburn-Day, numerous short-term rentals result in a large number of bags. With its own data, the team can now base expansion on where people are searching. He shared:

“We get thousands of bookings and tens of thousands of search queries a day, so we can see demand patterns in real time.

If a location has lots of searches but few conversions, we know we need more or better supply there. It gives us a really rich picture of global demand, and helps us grow intelligently rather than guessing.”

In terms of customer acquisition, Stasher’s biggest channels are partnerships and search.

According to Collias, partnerships make perfect sense because travel is time-specific.

“Think Airbnb hosts whose guests need storage before or after check-in. They already have the customers who need us.” Search – a mix of organic and paid — is the other big one. And when people search “luggage storage,”

It’s a location-based query, so Maps is crucial too. In terms of revenue, hosts charge a fixed fee per bag per day. It varies by geography and partnership type, but for most major partners, it’s roughly a 50/50 revenue share. Wedderburn-Day  asserts that the economics are solid: 

“We’ve been profitable for the last few months. We do have seasonal fluctuations — summer is strong, winter is slower — but the team's global reach means it's always summer somewhere, and overall, the business is safe and cash-flow positive.

The unit economics are very healthy. Growth just depends on how aggressively we choose to reinvest.”

Flywheel style growth

In terms of growth, Wedderburn-Day muses that “People assume you just pour money into ads, but that’s not how it works."

Our growth is more like a flywheel: A bit more demand lets us add more supply; more supply attracts more demand. Hosts generate visibility — more pins on Google Maps, more signage, more reviews — which boosts traffic.

That improves our economics, so we can invest more in marketing. It’s a conventional marketplace loop: demand → supply → demand.

The bigger you get, the better your product and conversion, so you can scale without burning cash.”

From startup to scaleup

Now Stasher is at a turning point — shifting from startup to established company.  Collias asserts, “When we talk about raising money now, it’s not about survival; it’s about how we can use capital to grow intelligently. There’s still huge room for expansion.”

Once you know where it makes sense to invest, you can shift from a variable-cost to a fixed-cost model in key areas, which is a powerful way to scale a marketplace sustainably.

Significantly, Stasher achieved its goals with less than £5 million in funding — partly by learning how to do "more with less". The duo cold-emailed their way from there to their first investor (Big Yellow Storage CEO), securing their first game-changing partnership with Premier Inn shortly after.

“Too many founders build to exit”

Ultimately, Collias believes that Europe needs to stop selling itself short. 

“Too many founders build to exit. We need bigger swings and the patience to stick around.”

Wedderburn-Day asserts that US companies have easier access to capital and higher valuations, this makes it easier for them to acquire European startups.

“Take Airbnb. One of the teams they acquired in Europe had incredibly capable founders. One of them stayed on as Head of Growth for years.

Clearly, he could’ve built something great independently. But the ecosystem didn’t make it worthwhile to stay independent.”

Collias believes:

“We need to make it make sense for founders to build long-term European champions, not sell early because of the system."

In many ways, Stasher’s journey offers an example to many startups. With just £2.5 million in total funding, the company built a profitable, global business in a fiercely competitive market — not by outspending rivals, but by outthinking them. It’s proof that capital efficiency can outperform capital abundance, and make it possible to turn a simple student idea into a worldwide category leader.

Lead image: Stasher co-founders Anthony Collias and Jacob Wedderburn-Day. Photo: uncredited.