Breaking News: Google Acquires BufferBox

Google and BufferBox announced this morning that effective Friday, November 30, BufferBox will be acquired by Google as part of a stock/cash deal. The acquisition by Google is yet another successful step for the BufferBox team in their amazing startup story.

BufferBox was founded in 2011 as part of Mike McCauley, Jay Shah and Aditya Bali‘s fourth year design project at the University of Waterloo, where the founders were all part of the Mechatronics Engineering program. Based on the success of their project work, the team decided to commercialize their invention upon graduation. They moved into the Accelerator Centre and sold their very first BufferBox to the university, placing it in the Student Life Centre.

In January, BufferBox won the VeloCity Venture Fund, a $25,000 grant for student startups to help them kickstart their businesses. Mike McCauley’s pitch during that event has become the gold standard for up and coming startups in the program with many people attempting to emulate his style. In February 2012, BufferBox moved into the VeloCity Garage.

By May, BufferBox had made the last minute decision to apply to Y Combinator and were accepted. In June, the team partially moved down to Silicon Valley to participate in the program, while also attempting to manage fast-growing production demand for their product in Toronto. The team finished up at Y Combinator as the first pitch at Demo Day and with several BufferBox kiosks installed at such amazing places as Communitech, Google, Walmart, and others.

In October, the company announced a big deal with Metrolinx in Toronto to roll out their kiosks at GO Transit stations throughout the city. While the deal with Google today undoubtedly marks their biggest to date, I have no doubt that the BufferBox team will continue to push hard to make rage-inspiring missed deliveries a thing of the past.

Here at VeloCity, we couldn’t be more proud of the BufferBox team and their incredible success. Mike, Jay, Adi and the whole team are some of the hardest working people I know. One of my favourite lines from them is, “we are working the new 9 to 5,” and when you looked at them weird, they would say, “9 am to 5 am!”

Congratulations BufferBox!

– Mike Kirkup, Director @UWVeloCity