PORT Banks €14.5 Million to Turn Its Courier Fleet Into Autonomous Delivery Robots

London-based PORT has closed a €14.5 million round to build AI-powered autonomous delivery robots on top of its existing UK courier and microhub network, bringing its total funding to €29 million. The round was led by EBRD and Balnord, with participation from both existing and new investors. PORT previously raised €14.5 million across its pre-Seed and Seed rounds.

Founded in 2020, PORT turns underutilised city spaces — underground car parks, warehouse space, railway arches — into electric vehicle hubs. It now runs 24 microhubs across London, Manchester and Birmingham, totaling 52,000 sq ft of repurposed urban space, and counts more than 50,000 couriers using its e-bike subscription model.

What does the money actually change?

It shifts PORT from logistics operator to robotics developer. Instead of building a separate test fleet, PORT is fitting a portion of its 3,500-strong e-bike fleet with NVIDIA-powered cameras and lidar, capturing real delivery data as couriers ride London's streets. Because those bikes are already out delivering every day, each newly fitted bike starts generating training data from its first shift.

When a bike returns to a hub, its footage uploads automatically over the hub's fibre connection. PORT processes it to isolate the situations that matter for training — everyday kerbs, cyclists and drop-off points, plus rare edge cases — and uses them to train its proprietary AI Driver specifically for urban delivery. That same AI Driver will eventually run PORT's own delivery robots on the same streets the data came from.

Founder and CEO Kamil Suda frames the sequence as deliberate. He said: "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. 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."

The investor logic

Ervin Luga, Head of Venture Capital Investments at EBRD, argues PORT's existing commercial operation is the differentiator. He said: "PORT's impressive, proven commercial operation provides the ideal foundation for the next evolution of autonomous, robotic urban infrastructure. 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. PORT is actively building that data and already has the infrastructure in place to be able to make better use of it than anyone."

Hub placement is the strategic piece. PORT's robotic vision only works if robots can be stored, loaded and charged within a few miles of the delivery address. In London, the network already covers 92% of addresses within a one-mile radius of the Congestion Charge Zone, and 60% within two miles across inner London. Before the end of 2026, PORT will open its first micro-hub outside the UK, in central Paris.

Royal Mail is already at the table

PORT's next development phase involves an entirely new robotic delivery system in partnership with Royal Mail. Jack Clarkson, Managing Director of Out-of-Home for Royal Mail, said: "We are always looking for solutions and partners to help elevate our customer proposition, reduce our costs and reach our sustainability goals. The PORT team are providing us with access to frontier technology and expertise that can help us unlock the next evolution of urban logistics. We want to be at the forefront of this last-mile innovation, and look forward to continuing and deepening our partnership."

The delivery record to date: PORT cargo bikes have delivered more than 300,000 parcels since the company added trailers to the fleet in September 2025, enabling e-bike couriers to carry parcels. Each delivery reportedly produces roughly 90% lower emissions than the equivalent diesel van run.

A wider European funding wave

PORT's round lands amid a run of 2026 European deals in last-mile logistics, electric mobility and robotics. UK companies alone account for several: Forest secured €31 million in additional financing for e-bike operations, Dexory added €9.8 million from the British Business Bank for autonomous warehouse technology, and GIN e-bikes took €215k in debt financing.

Across the Channel, Czechia's Grid.online raised €4 million for shared parcel-delivery infrastructure, the Netherlands' Sparqle secured €1.5 million with EU backing for emission-free deliveries, Poland's Nomagic raised €8.3 million to scale warehouse robotics in the US, and France's Decade Energy secured €22 million for depot electrification. Together those announcements represent roughly €76.8 million in reported financing — rising to €91.3 million once PORT's new round is included.

For operators watching from the sidelines, the signal is that Europe's last-mile money is consolidating around companies that already own physical infrastructure and proprietary data, not just the robots themselves.