Have a lot of stuff? Don’t have a lot of space to store that stuff? Don’t know how you’d get yourself organized enough to keep track of it, even if you did have the space? No worries. Urban storage startup Boxbee has the solution to all your too-much-stuff-having problems.
The idea behind Boxbee is simple: You put stuff in a box. Then Boxbee comes and takes the box and puts it in secure storage for $6 per month per box. If you want your stuff back, Boxbee will deliver it to you for $15 plus $2 per box. Boxes are 24 inches long by 20 inches tall by 12 inches wide, so they’re not HUGE. But they should provide ample space for users to keep their winter clothes stored away for a few months.
In addition to the storage service itself, Boxbee has a web interface and mobile app for keeping track of all the stuff you’ve stored. That is, you can take photos and categorize items that you’ve got in one box or another. That way, when you need items in a particular box, you can make sure that you get the right one.
On the storage side, Boxbee manages a network of commercial warehouses and keeps tabs on what goes where with the help of barcodes. Pretty soon, it’ll be moving to RFID tags, which should improve the process even more. Since it operates in a 15-mile radius of San Francisco, the company can make deliveries from its warehouses within hours of a request being made.
Boxbee hopes that by making storage more convenient and a little less expensive than renting out a whole unit, it will be able to tap into a new market of customers who should probably be storing their crap somewhere other than their tiny apartments, but don’t want to deal with the cost and hassle of doing so.
The company launched at um, LAUNCH, where it received the best new startup award. It has been operating in private beta since then, spending the last few months as part of the AngelPad startup incubator in San Francisco (which has its demo day next week!). The startup is in the process of raising a seed round, which it will use to make a few more hires and expand into new markets.