Bloq.it Brand Guidelines: Lisbon Smart Lockers, the NEXT Battery Locker & Vinted Go

From storage lockers to parcel lockers.

Bloq.it is a smart-locker company based in Lisbon and founded in 2019. On the timeline it publishes about itself, the company says its founders first met in Silicon Valley in 2018, and that it began in 2019 by launching a storage-locker network of its own in Portugal. When Covid-19 arrived in 2020, it says, it pivoted to out-of-home smart lockers for parcels: banks of lockers where shoppers collect or send online orders away from home.

The company names two co-founders on its website: Miha Jagodic, its chief executive, and João Lopes, who serves as chief revenue officer and chief operating officer. Retail Technology Innovation Hub reported on 29 May 2025 that Portugal-based Bloq.it, founded in 2019, had closed a Series B funding round, and quoted both men. Jagodic told the publication that the company’s “core goal remains to change the parcel delivery status quo,” and Lopes said Bloq.it was “at the core of the transition to out-of-home delivery all across Europe.” The money, the report said, would go mainly to hiring and to launching operations in new European markets, with acquisitions also part of the plan.

Bloq.it’s own announcement of the round, dated 28 May 2025, describes it as one of the largest Series B rounds raised by a Portugal-based company, and says that expansion into more cities and hiring across Europe was already under way. The company says it is headquartered in Lisbon, with offices in Porto, France and Croatia, and a team of more than 300 people drawn from 11 countries. It says its lockers stand across Europe, most of all in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, the Czech Republic and Iceland, and its timeline records a 2024 milestone of more than 500 lockers installed in a single week.

NEXT, Drop and Bloq.OS.

Bloq.it sells three things together: locker hardware, software for running a locker network, which it calls Bloq.OS, and field services for deployment, maintenance and technical support. Retail Technology Innovation Hub described its lockers and systems as designed to integrate with any logistics player, and to be scalable and customisable for different countries, locations and product types.

Its main locker model is NEXT, which the company dates to 2024 and calls its battery-powered autonomous locker. It comes in two versions. One runs on swappable rechargeable lithium iron phosphate batteries, so it can stand where there is no mains supply; the other plugs into the grid. Bloq.it lists a 10-inch colour touchscreen, a QR and barcode reader and a label printer among the parts, and steel as the body material. The company says NEXT is “engineered in-house” and “manufactured in Europe”; it does not name a factory.

A smaller product, Drop, is a compact box for returns. The shopper scans a code, prints a label at the box and posts the parcel through a single slot, and the courier empties the box in one collection. Bloq.it describes its frame as reinforced steel with an anti-corrosion coating.

Most of the company’s work is for carriers and marketplaces that run their own branded networks. Bloq.it’s timeline lists pilot projects in 2021 with El Corte Inglés and Sonae Sierra; its first enterprise-scale project, Vinted Go, in 2022; a contract with DHL eCommerce in 2023 that took it to Czechia and Italy, followed in 2024 by networks for PPL and Locker Italia under that deal; an agreement with GLS in Spain and Italy in 2024; and, in 2025, its Bloq.OS software running the open locker network of DeinFach in Germany. Its customer pages also describe work for inboxx, which it calls the joint out-of-home venture of GLS Germany and DPD Germany, and for Dropp, which built a locker network in Iceland. The Vinted Go page places that network in France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Lockers as public infrastructure.

Parcel locker companies are seen first as street furniture. Their machines stand in banks outside supermarkets, petrol stations, railway stations and shopping centres, finished in the operator’s colours — often yellow, red or grey. The first InPost Paczkomat, for example, was set up in Kraków in 2009, according to Polish Wikipedia, and the company reported some 62,000 machines across its group at the end of 2025.

Up close, the brand is an interface. A touchscreen, a keypad, a QR code or a code sent by text message opens one door among dozens, and some operators, InPost among them, let customers open a compartment from a phone app instead. Some machines hide the storage altogether: a robotic locker keeps parcels on shelves inside and hands each one out through a single window, as the robot Cleveron installed at a Walmart store in Arkansas in 2016 did, according to the Estonian broadcaster ERR.

Not every locker is public. Makers also sell systems for apartment-building lobbies, offices, university campuses and shops, where the machine may carry the landlord’s or retailer’s name rather than the maker’s. In those places the locker company’s brand often lives in software, signage and the small print on the cabinet, while the delivery vans and couriers that fill the lockers carry the carrier’s livery.

Beyond the street, these companies present themselves at logistics fairs and postal-industry events, in trade press and in investor material, where lockers are shown as hardware, software and service together. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where its machines are designed and made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A maker that stays behind its clients’ names.

Bloq.it writes its name with a full stop in the middle, Bloq.it, and uses that spelling throughout its website, its newsroom and its product pages. Its staff are called “bloqstars” on its careers pages, and its site closes with lines such as “Delivering the Future” and an invitation to “join the smart locker revolution.”

Much of what the public sees, though, carries other names. Bloq.it’s case studies describe networks run under the brands of its clients, from Vinted Go to DeinFach, with Bloq.it supplying hardware, software or both.

The company lists its own honours on its about page, attributing each to the organiser. They include a product-design award for NEXT in 2026 and second place in Deloitte’s 2025 Technology Fast 500 ranking for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, which ranks fast-growing private technology companies; the company’s funding announcement of May 2025 repeats the Deloitte placing.

For a design guide, Bloq.it shows how a young hardware company can build a brand mostly for business buyers while its lockers carry other companies’ names. Compare InPost, which runs its own locker network, and DHL, one of Bloq.it’s carrier clients. For this guide we use a deep ink, a teal and a coral with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bloq.it’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.