Cleveron Brand Guidelines: The Viljandi Robotic Parcel Locker Maker That Began as SmartPOST

A furniture shop’s delivery problem.

Cleveron began with a delivery problem. The company says its owners set up an online furniture store, ON24, in 2000, struggled to find logistics partners, and in 2006 created their own logistics department, which soon became a separate company trading as SmartPOST. In 2007 the legal name Cleveron was registered, and the company names its founders as Arno Kütt, Peep Kuld and Indrek Oolup; the technology site tech.eu gave the same three names in 2023.

The first lockers were its own. Estonian Wikipedia says SmartPOST opened a network of parcel terminals in Estonia in 2009, and the company says the aim was to develop and sell locker hardware and software while running SmartPOST’s own network. In 2010 the SmartPOST network, the business that ran it and the SmartPOST brand were sold to the Finnish postal group Itella. The remaining company took the Cleveron name it had registered earlier and concentrated on building the machines rather than operating them. Cleveron says it registered its first European Union trademark the same year.

The home town stayed. Cleveron’s head office and development centre are in Viljandi, a small town in southern Estonia, with an office in Tallinn, according to Estonian Wikipedia. In September 2015 the Estonian public broadcaster ERR reported that the firm had made about a thousand parcel terminals in five years with some 40 staff. In October 2018 ERR reported that Cleveron, named Estonia’s company of the year for 2018, had opened a new production and development complex in Viljandi three times the size of the old one, and that staff numbers had grown from 40 to 170 in two years.

Estonian Wikipedia says a 2022 demerger split off the self-driving delivery vehicle business as Cleveron Mobility, later renamed Clevon, a separate company.

The robot behind one window.

Cleveron’s signature is the robotic parcel locker: instead of a wall of doors, a robot inside the machine stores parcels on shelves and hands each one out through a single window. ERR described the idea in 2015, explaining that this saves storage space compared with a terminal that gives out parcels from separate doors. The company dates the idea to 2011 and launched a new-generation Cleveron 401 in 2015.

The United States gave the robot its stage. In September 2015 ERR reported a plan with the American company Bell and Howell to supply 15,000 parcel robots to the US market over five years, and in November 2016 it reported that the first PackRobot had opened in mid-September at a Walmart store in Bentonville, Arkansas, home of Walmart’s head office, with the robots built in Viljandi and serviced by Bell and Howell. Cleveron says Walmart announced plans in 2018 to install its robotic lockers in stores across the country, and that the same year Inditex installed the first Cleveron 402 in a Zara store.

The range has widened since. Cleveron lists the 402 and the redesigned 403 robotic lockers, launched in January 2025, the 301 and 302 indoor lockers, and the 351, 352, 354 and 355 lockers for outdoor and oversized goods; it calls the 354 of 2023 a battery-powered locker. Customers named on its site include the Swiss retailer Migros, the Swedish grocer ICA, the Finnish carrier Matkahuolto and Telia, with which it says it created a digital agency concept in 2021.

Recognition is mostly from the trade. Cleveron’s robotic lockers were named Delivery Innovation of the Year in 2016 and won bronze at the Edison Awards in 2017 — Cleveron’s timeline credits both to the 401, while its 402 page and Estonian Wikipedia credit the 402 — and the company says the 402 was a finalist at the DesignEuropa Awards in 2023. Estonian Wikipedia lists its 2018 national awards as company of the year, design adopter of the year and innovator of the year.

How locker companies present themselves.

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.

Still made in Viljandi.

Cleveron remains an Estonian company, Cleveron AS, and describes itself as a technology company that develops and manufactures parcel lockers and robotic parcel lockers. ERR reported in 2016 that the robots for Walmart were being built in Viljandi, and in 2018 that the new Viljandi complex combined production and development. The company says it holds more than 150 intellectual property rights in force and has filed more than 200 applications in over 30 countries.

The founders have stayed central to its story. In 2017 EY Estonia named Arno Kütt and Peep Kuld Estonia’s entrepreneurs of the year, according to Estonian Wikipedia, which also says Kütt sold a tenth of the company to a Danish fund in 2023 and that in October that year Cleveron cut 38 jobs, closing loss-making lines to concentrate on Europe and retail automation. Tech.eu reported in September 2023 that a funding round had been led by Denmark’s Nordic Secondary Fund. In 2024 the company appointed Per Klavsen as chief executive, it says.

The company also invests in its town. With the Estonian Entrepreneurship University of Applied Sciences it set up the Cleveron Academy in 2019, a robotics-software course taught partly in its own development and production unit in Viljandi, and Estonian Wikipedia says the partnership won a regional development award from the Ministry of Finance in 2020. Cleveron says it is a lead sponsor of the AHHAA RoboBattle robotics competition.

For a design guide, Cleveron shows a maker whose brand lives inside other companies’ shops: the retailer’s name is on the store, and the robot behind the window is Cleveron’s. Compare InPost, which designs lockers for its own network, and SwipBox, a Danish locker maker. For this guide we use a deep green, a machine grey and a lichen green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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