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Stasher has secured approximately $4 million to expand its luggage-storage marketplace and install more smart lockers at hotels and other travel locations across the United Kingdom and Europe, per Hotel Technology News. The financing includes about $2.7 million in growth funding from Gilion and a $1.3 million strategic investment from smart-locker operator Hive Box, which will provide an initial 100 lockers for deployment by mid-2027.
Premier Inn is the largest hotel group involved in the rollout so far. A pilot began at Premier Inn London St Pancras in November 2025, and the lockers are now operating at 17 Premier Inn properties in London, Edinburgh and Manchester. Other installations include Zedwell Trocadero in London and Kula properties in Kensington and Birmingham. Staycity Aparthotels uses earlier Stasher locker models at several locations in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Stasher said bookings across its smart-locker network are growing 108% month over month. Its best-performing location is generating about $3,300 in weekly locker revenue, which maintained for a full year would produce approximately $173,000. Stasher CEO and co-founder Jacob Wedderburn-Day said the funding will help the company bring lockers to more hotels while reducing manual handling for their teams.
What the locker economics mean for hotel tech vendors
The revenue figures matter because they change the conversation inside hotel groups. A single locker location producing roughly $3,300 weekly gives a general manager a concrete line item, not a guest-experience abstraction. That makes the business case for ancillary revenue technology easier to defend in budget meetings.
For vendors selling into hotels, the expansion is a buying window. Each new locker installation touches the property's physical layout, its booking flow, and its staff workflows. That means integration work for PMS providers, payment processors handling the booking transactions, and guest-facing platforms. Stasher's existing agreement with Quadient gave its customers access to more than 1,640 UK lockers in 2025, and the Hive Box deal adds another 100 units by mid-2027. The competitive pressure is real: Bounce reports more than 32,000 partner locations across over 4,000 cities, and Radical Storage reports approximately 16,500 partner locations in more than 2,300 cities, with Radical adding automated storage through an agreement with Quadient making more than 2,000 Parcel Pending lockers available across the UK.
Deliverect lands a 140-location US chain
Deliverect will deploy its third-party order aggregation and menu management platform across KPOT Korean BBQ & Hot Pot's national restaurant network in the United States, per Restaurant Tech News. KPOT has grown from a single restaurant in 2018 to more than 140 US locations, operating through a franchise model.
The deal is a US story, but it signals where Deliverect is concentrating its sales effort: large franchise networks that need centralised control over third-party ordering. For UK vendors competing with Deliverect, the takeaway is that the company is winning on operational stability and consistency at scale, not on novelty. Victor Chow, Senior Vice President and Partner at KPOT, said standardising third-party ordering across 140-plus locations is critical for maintaining consistency at scale. Noah Hayes, VP at Deliverect, called KPOT one of the most impressive growth stories in the restaurant industry.
Trustly cuts 200 roles, mostly outside Europe
Swedish open banking company Trustly is cutting 200 jobs, a quarter of its staff, per Finextra. The cuts will mostly be concentrated on its Brazilian operations. A Trustly spokesperson said the changes impact around 200 roles globally and are about sharpening focus and concentrating investment behind priorities in the open banking market.
Trustly counts BNY Mellon, Alibaba, PayPal and Wise among its clients, and has raised over $400 million in funding since inception. Finextra reports Trustly lost a significant chunk of revenue when it lost two major unnamed clients, which subsequently returned. For UK hospitality payment vendors, the restructuring is a signal that Trustly is rationalising its footprint rather than retreating from Europe. The open banking market remains competitive, and a leaner Trustly may be more aggressive on the priorities it keeps.
Duqu raises €1.5m to automate late-payment lending
Amsterdam-based fintech Duqu has raised €1.5 million in a pre-seed round from Curiosity VC and No Such Ventures, per Finextra. Duqu gives businesses immediate access to money tied up in outstanding invoices, and has built an AI underwriting engine that automates 95% of the credit assessment process. Once approved, money is transferred within 24 hours, often within an hour.
Duqu offers the technology as a white-label solution to banks, lenders and leasing companies. In its first three months since going live, it processed more than €4 million in applications and provided over €1 million in advances. The late-payment problem it targets is acute in the Netherlands, where businesses pay 46% of their B2B invoices after the due date. For UK hospitality suppliers, cash-flow tools like Duqu's matter because the sector runs on extended payment terms. A white-label underwriting engine that lenders can bolt onto their own credit policies lowers the cost of serving smaller working-capital needs, which is exactly the segment many hospitality suppliers occupy.
A note on Peach Data
Peach Data provides verified, TPS-screened contact data across thousands of UK hospitality venues. When a hotel group adds locker infrastructure or a restaurant chain centralises its ordering stack, the buying contacts change. peachdata.co.uk