Why Citibox's EIC Accelerator Parcel Boxes Reached 60,000, Not 3M

Citibox puts lockers for online orders inside the entrance halls of apartment buildings, so that couriers can leave a parcel when nobody is home and residents can collect it, or send a return, at any hour. In June 2019 the European Commission selected the Spanish company in the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator, and awarded it a grant of €1,723,093.75 towards a €2,461,562.50 project, according to CORDIS. The proposal promised that "by 2023 our network will cover +10 largest EU cities with +3M smart mailboxes", with more than €180 million of revenue and €70 million of EBITDA that year.

That did not happen. In April 2026 Citibox reported "more than 60,000" smart mailboxes in Madrid, Barcelona and London, according to Amazon, which announced a Europe-wide agreement to deliver its customers' parcels into them. In the same month the infrastructure investor Ithaka led a €100 million round, according to Forbes. The company is alive and well funded; its EU-era targets were off by a factor of 50.

Where Citibox Stands in 2026

Citibox is active and in the middle of its largest expansion. The round announced on 27 April 2026 combines €70 million of equity and €30 million of debt: Ithaka Infrastructure Partners put in €55 million of equity and all the debt and takes a board seat, and existing shareholders led by Pedro Tortosa added €15 million, according to Capital Riesgo and Alimarket. The money is to fund a first phase of 600,000 new mailboxes, starting in Spain and England, Emprendedores reports.

The Spanish company register shows the round going through: capital increases on 23 April and in May 2026, board changes in May and a new chair, Vobru Gestión SL, appointed in June 2026, with KPMG reappointed as auditor, according to the register extracts on Infonif. Revenue, results and equity from the filed accounts are not freely available, so the company's profitability could not be verified.

The Technology: A Locker in Every Lobby

Most parcel lockers stand in public places, at stations, supermarkets or pick-up shops, and many belong to one carrier or one retailer, such as Amazon's own lockers. Citibox's pitch to the EU was the opposite: banks of mailboxes inside residential buildings that any courier can use, built from cheap hardware that the company said needs "no internet or electricity connection", with Citibox's cloud software opening doors and lockers. The proposal also included access control for the building door so that registered couriers could deliver at night. The company claimed couriers would save 60% of delivery time and that every delivery would succeed at the first attempt, figures CORDIS repeats from the company and which have not been independently tested.

Residents pay nothing for the boxes or the app; the money comes from carriers and retailers, Citibox's chief executive David Bernabeu told the EU's CORDIS results summary in 2022. In 2023 the company added a second business, buying the reverse logistics firm Celeritas and its network of pick-up points for about €21 million, according to El Referente; Marketing4Ecommerce put the price at more than €20 million and Celeritas's network at more than 4,000 points. By 2024 the company counted more than 7,000.

What the EU Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

Citibox appears as "CITIBOX", Spain, in the Commission's list of companies selected at the 5 June 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the grant-only Horizon 2020 pilot that became the EIC Accelerator; no other beneficiary is listed for the project. The grant agreement was signed on 25 September 2019, and the project ran for 24 months from 1 October 2019, according to CORDIS. It is the company's only project on CORDIS.

The final periodic report describes work on the platform rather than on scale. Citibox redesigned the residents' app "from scratch", let users solve delivery problems on their own, added tools for concierges and couriers, ran "our first pilot in Paris and the beginning of our operation there", launched a new business model in France and developed "a different approach" for the Czech Republic, with Deloitte helping on international partnerships. On money, it said a Series B had been launched and that it was in "exclusive negotiations with an international private equity fund" to finance the mailbox infrastructure. It also said that talks with carriers were still affected by COVID-19.

1. Scale the lock and cloud platformDeliveredNew user app, courier and concierge tools reported to CORDIS; network grew to 60,000+ mailboxes by 2026.
2. Pilots in major European citiesPartlyParis pilot run; Czech plan only on paper. Whether Paris still operates could not be verified.
3. 10+ EU cities and 3M+ mailboxes by 2023Not achievedAbout 50,000 in Madrid and Barcelona in 2024; 60,000+ in three cities in 2026.
4. €180M revenue and €70M EBITDA in 2023Not verifiableRevenue of €135M+ was forecast for 2024, about €70M of it from Celeritas; EBITDA not published.
5. Infrastructure financingDelivered, late€80M bond issue in 2024 and a €100M round led by an infrastructure fund in 2026.

The project ended on time, and the work it describes was done. What it was meant to unlock, a fast roll-out across Europe, came years later and on a much smaller scale. The proposal also named UPS and DPD Group as committed supporters; no public agreement with UPS has been found, while Seur put €750,000 into a €6.2 million Citibox round, according to El Referente; Alimarket reported Seur's entry in July 2018, when Citibox had 4,900 mailboxes.

What Citibox Has Achieved Since the Award

The network grew more than eightfold after the grant, from about 7,000 mailboxes in Madrid in June 2019, when an €11 million round brought in former Ono chief executive Richard Alden as chairman, according to Valencia Plaza. At that time the company said it aimed to be in ten European cities within three years and was setting up a subsidiary in Paris. Spain's development finance institution COFIDES backed the Paris launch in November 2019 without disclosing an amount. The company's website says it started operating in France in October 2020 and is launching a pick-up network in France and Germany; neither claim could be confirmed by a second source.

The money arrived after the project ended. In July 2024 Citibox raised €80 million through a private bond issue listed in Vienna, led by Growth Credit Partners of London and CoVenture of New York, according to Tech.eu and Emprendedores. The company then had 250 staff and expected more than €135 million of consolidated revenue for 2024, about €70 million of it from Celeritas, according to Alimarket. It promised to reach more than 600,000 mailboxes in Spain's ten largest cities within three years. Two years on, it reports 60,000.

Why Europe Should Care

Delivery vans are 7% of urban traffic but cause 12% of congestion costs, Bernabeu told CORDIS, and failed first deliveries add repeat trips. The European Commission's New EU Urban Mobility Framework of December 2021 prioritises zero-emission solutions for "the last mile of urban deliveries". A neutral network that any carrier can use is the kind of shared infrastructure that cuts repeat trips without locking cities into one courier's system, and Citibox claims a CO2 cut of up to 69% in last-mile logistics, a company figure that has not been independently verified.

The 2026 deal complicates the neutrality argument. Amazon is now a key commercial partner, and the round was explicitly tied to that agreement. Whether the boxes stay open on equal terms to Spanish and European carriers as Amazon volumes grow is a question the public record does not yet answer.

The Verdict

Citibox was not asked for comment for this article. It is based on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout. Citibox is not in the EIC Fund portfolio, which was checked page by page on 8 October 2026.