Interview - Bloq.it CEO Miha Jagodic outlines ambitious growth plans

Parcel locker technology newcomer Bloq.it has ambitious growth plans and is targeting new customers and more markets after sealing milestone European deals with Vinted and DHL, and has high hopes for its new battery-powered locker, CEO and co-founder Miha Jagodic told CEP-Research in an interview.

The Portugal-based company, founded in 2019, is positioning itself as a universal software provider for existing locker networks and also as a hardware provider amid surging demand for out-of-home delivery solutions in many countries, the Slovenian entrepreneur explained at the recent DELIVER Europe 2024 event in Amsterdam.

Milestone contracts

Among its main recent developments, Bloq.it has signed a long-term contract to be the exclusive provider of smart lockers and software for the Vinted Go network as this expands in France and into other countries. The company has already installed about 2,000 lockers for the C2C marketplace in France.

Last September, the lockers technology company sealed a deal with DHL eCommerce to power “thousands” of their lockers with its Bloq.it OS software solution, starting with the Czech Republic and with other markets to follow.

Then in May this year, it secured a contract to become the software provider for the new DHL-backed OneStopBox carrier agnostic locker network in Germany, which aims to roll out thousands of units over the next three years.

Next-generation parcel locker

Earlier this month, Bloq.it launched NEXT, a battery-powered smart locker, offering the features of traditional electric lockers, such as a user screen, scanner and printer, with the flexibility of battery operation. Featuring a swappable battery system with a 2-year lifespan, the company claims that NEXT can be deployed anywhere, reducing site preparation costs by up to 88%.

The new locker was first showcased at DELIVER Europe where the Bloq.it co-founder also presented his views on the advantages of parcel lockers for retailers, carriers and customers at a company workshop.

Interview

CEP-Research: Miha, tell us about Bloq.it’s development, strategy and partnerships.

Miha Jagodic: Bloq.it started in 2019 with an idea of building an agnostic locker network. But we were a little bit ahead of our time. The first problem we encountered was finding a provider that could actually customise both software and hardware for us. We failed to find any. That's where we decided to build everything ourselves from scratch, so both hardware and software.

Right after that, COVID hit and e-commerce grew, and all of a sudden, we found ourselves in a rapidly growing industry with one of the best solutions on the market. In 2020, we became a software-orientated tech company providing smart parcel lockers.

Vinted lockers

In 2022, we got a chance to work with Vinted as a first big account. We needed to find a big client, and Vinted was the first one to trust us. Their user flow is a little bit different, it's C2C, and they couldn't find anyone that could be so customisable and flexible as we were, so that's why they gave us a chance.

First was a pilot project of 200 lockers in 2022, and then in 2023, after they were massively successful, we did 2,000 lockers for them in France. This year, we're planning to do 3,000 more, and I'm pretty sure Vinted's ambition is to keep growing with huge numbers for many years to come. This year, we're expanding to Benelux. Then next year, more countries.

DHL software provider

Vinted put us on the map, and this is where I believe we became interesting also for DHL. DHL eCommerce was growing very fast, also inorganically, which meant they were acquiring different locker networks. At some point, they found that their network was consisting of different hardware solutions, so they decided to find a software layer that would unify the entire locker network with different hardware solutions.

Our software was seen as the most flexible in that regard, so they trusted us to deploy our software on the existing locker networks and also with all the new lockers. So that’s what we're doing now. We started in the Czech Republic with PPL and are launching now in Italy with Poste Italiane. We have more countries on the roadmap.

The most recent reference is OneStopBox (OSB), a very exciting project in Germany for an agnostic network where we were trusted with the software as well. With DHL and OSB, it's not just software, we also maintain their lockers. The only difference between these deals and Vinted really is that the hardware is not ours like it is with Vinted.

CEP-Research: Do you have any other partnerships or commercial activities that you can talk about?

Jagodic: DHL and Vinted have definitely put us on the map. Our primary goal is to work with at least one big new partner every year. Our focus is to be a trusted provider. We want to ensure there are no bad experiences with the networks that we provide.

Battery-powered locker

CEP-Research: What are your plans with the new battery-powered locker?

Jagodic: With software we want to have a very clear distinction: if you want to have the most flexible, the most data-driven, the most advanced software, then we're the ones. When it comes to hardware, we have a very strong R&D engineering team and we dedicate a lot of effort to perfecting the hardware as well.

So, after a lot of engineering and R&D, we have now developed the locker that we call NEXT because we actually believe this is the next generation. It's an autonomous locker solution with screen, printer, barcodes, video surveillance. You can deploy it anywhere off grid. The battery lasts for a year and is swappable when the routine maintenance is done.

CEP-Research: Is there a price difference compared to competitors with long-life, 10-year batteries?

Jagodic: Currently, our battery locker solution is more expensive than the other ones and that's because we don't necessarily compete with the simple battery locker solution. We compete more with an electric grid-powered locker. NEXT has all the same electronics, all the functionality and has a battery.

CEP-Research: How many lockers are running on Bloq.it software at the moment?

Jagodic: There are more than 3,000 units as of today running on Bloq.it software and we already process more than a million parcels through our network per month. By the end of this year, there will be between 6,000 and 8,000 units, depending on the speed of deployment. We believe by the end of 2025, there will be roughly 20,000 lockers running on the Bloq.it software. That's because the current partners we're working with are growing very fast, so they're driving our software distribution.

CEP-Research: What kind of reliability performance do you have for the lockers using your software?

Jagodic: Our uptime is always above 99.9%. We're brave enough to contract the uptime.

Big ambitions

CEP-Research: What else is on your agenda at the moment?

Jagodic: It would be easier to say what is not my agenda. Bloq.it has very, very ambitious plans. Our ambition is to become the biggest smart locker provider in the world per revenue per unit sold and to retain our position as the best software solution.

The number one component that gets us there is really how we scale the best team. We put an enormous amount of effort into gathering the best team. This is how we feel that we're going to win in the long run.

CEP-Research: It looks like the lockers market is going grow and grow, so perhaps there will be new winners as well as the established names?  

Jagodic: If there are new winners, we're most likely going to look to acquire them. We're very determined on retaining our number one position.