More great news from Kitchener Waterloo’s business community, BufferBox has been acquired by Google. No numbers have been confirmed, but the rumours are that the deal was for approx $17 million.
If you don’t know what BufferBox is yet, there is a great article about them in the Globe and Mail: Sick of missing your online order delivery? Here’s an option
By some estimates, a whopping 60 per cent of all deliveries fail on the first attempt. But where you might see little more than an annoying trip to a courier’s package depot, three University of Waterloo grads saw an opportunity to build one of the hottest tech start-ups on the continent.
It’s called BufferBox, and it is, at its core, a simple locker rental service. Instead of entering your own shipping address when you make a purchase online, you sign up with the service and use one of their addresses. The package is then delivered to a secure BufferBox locker – a rectangular green block with a touchscreen interface that makes it look a little like a larger version of an automated parking garage ticket-payment machine. When your package arrives, BufferBox sends you a notification e-mail with a PIN that unlocks the locker so you can pick up your order whenever you want. No more missed deliveries. “We just saw this really cool problem that could be solved with technology,” says Aditya Bali, one of the company’s co-founders. “There’s this massive pressure to improve the service of e-retailing while lowering the cost.”
Have you used BufferBox yet? I haven’t, but I think I’m going to try out the location at The Hub at The Tannery in Kitchener. Their website at http://bufferbox.com has details on current locations and their service.
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