Google snaps up Waterloo startup BufferBox - Financial Post

Parcel pickup kiosk operator BufferBox Inc. is moving on up to Google Inc., quite literally, after being acquired by the huge tech firm.

That’s because home base for the team behind the Waterloo, Ont.-based startup is the VeloCity Garage inside the Communitech Hub startup incubator, located in the famed Lang Tannery building in the warehouse district â€" downstairs from Google’s regional office.

We’re really excited to be able to build out that vision quite a bit quicker than we otherwise would have without them on side

On Friday, Google announced it has acquired the not-quite-two-year-old startup for an undisclosed sum, which means the team at BufferBox will be moving their operations up a flight of stairs to join the Google team on the upper floor of the building.

While the physical move will be a short one for BufferBox, the trio of University of Waterloo graduates who created the company are hoping to leverage Google’s considerable resources to quickly scale their business and change the way people think about e-commerce and shipping packages.

“Being a small company and a startup, there’s obviously a lot of challenges,” BufferBox chief executive Mr. McCauley said in an interview.

“So us being able to work very closely with someone like Google allows us to leverage their resources and share vision and combine thoughts and talent together to really make something a lot bigger than we ever would have imagined. We’re really excited to be able to build out that vision quite a bit quicker than we otherwise would have without them onside.”

BufferBox’s service provides users with temporary lockers in central locations which can accept packages sent by online retailers. Users sign up for a BufferBox address, which is provided to the online merchant. When a parcel arrives at one of BufferBox’s self-serve kiosks, the users receives an email and can pick up their package using a one-time-use code. The locker can then be used to store a package from another user.

BufferBox announced last month it had reached a deal with Metrolinx to roll out its self-serve parcel pickup kiosks to GO Transit stations, including Toronto’s Union Station. The company aims to have 100 BufferBoxes installed in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton area by the end of 2013. In addition to transit hubs, the company is also working on agreements with grocery and convenience stores.

We think there’s a real exciting space beyond this amazing start with boxes

The company â€" which graduated from Silicon Valley’s Y Combinator accelerator program this summer â€" is offering the service for free this year to help build up a user base. Eventually the company plans to charge $3 or $4 per package delivered to its boxes.

Google Waterloo engineering director Steve Woods said the BufferBox team â€" which consists of seven employees beyond its trio of founders â€" will be kept intact, with Google providing additional resources to help the company grow. Google plans to keep the BufferBox brand for the foreseeable future.

“We’re going to keep doing BufferBox,” Mr. Woods said in an interview.

“We’re not going to go into great detail about our future plans, but we think there’s a real exciting space beyond this amazing start with boxes, and the idea of touching consumers as part of their end-to-end experience is something we’re going to explore together. I don’t think we would say even definitively what it’s going to be, but we’re going to do some great things together.”

For Google, the addition of BufferBox will augment the company’s growing mobile commerce operations in Waterloo, where most of the company’s mobile shopping products are built.

“Our goal is always to find founders with passion and great ideas to have them come in and not to take them apart, but instead to let them run and give them access to some of the services and things that we can do at Google and across some of our other products to make their vision big,” Mr. Woods said.