Our Story
2019.
Why we started?
After successful stints in corporate life, Jacques had a burning desire to go it alone. Infatuated by the power of automation and its transformational impact on hard-working businesses, Jacques felt he was destined to build a company that would see automation enter organisations all over the world.
He searched far and wide to find the missing member of the founding team. Many coffees & lunches later he met Bot-Hive’s CTO, Joe Keene; One became two. With the pre-seed support of Britbots & Startup Funding Club, the long awaited journey began.
2020.
Early Customer Development
Battling against the onslaught of the global pandemic, the team spent their early days generating leads from the 1.0 platform and acting as a distributor of collaborative robots, robot accessories and various service robots.
Early revenue success saw us onboard additional early stage investors including the Development Bank of Wales and esteemed angel investors.
2021
Onboard Enterprise Customers
What started as early customer engagements, blossomed into strategic partnerships with a number of global manufacturers, logistics companies and academic institutions. Common issues facing engineers began to emerge, in particular the challenge of multi-component interfacing.
It soon became apparent that applying data to interfacing modelling gave us a unique view on how different automation devices can be more intelligently structured together.
2022-2025
The Future
Today, Bot-Hive is focused on becoming the global ecosystem for engineers to access product intelligence and application block-codes under one standardised interfacing framework.
Our ambition is to become an industry leader in the new era of automation, the era of Flexible Automation.
Meet the team
CEO & Co-Founder
An award winning commercial leader with a track record of building and commercialising digital solutions across a range of industries. Having started life as a young professional footballer, Jacques moved into the business world following a series of injury setbacks. Establishing himself as a sales and marketing professional, Jacques saw the transition of corporate life during the financial crisis and the emergence of industrial digitalisation. In 2017, Jacques fell in love with all things robotics and saw the need for organisations to adopt flexible automation using new and emerging technologies. A digital marketing professional at heart, Jacques applies a highly agile and iterative approach to engineering and is a regular speaker on the topic of Industry 4.0, flexible automation and micro-services.
CTO & Co-Founder
Joe leads Bot-Hive's technology team. Working alongside Jacques, Joe explores emerging technologies, assesses their impact on the business, prototypes new concepts and recommends new strategies and solutions. Prior to joining Bot-Hive in 2018, Joe worked as a senior consultant for his own business, using his 15 years of experience - he provided digital and software solutions for an array of global companies across several industries. He's fluent in French, has two degrees, loves learning and building all things digital and has developed a real passion for robotics since joining Bot-Hive.
Head of Mechanical Engineering
With a PhD in automatous flexible forming machinery from the University of Bath, Dan heads up Bot-Hive's mechanical engineering front. Leveraging his experiences in the food and pharmaceutical automation sectors, he is well-positioned to lead the team in developing cutting-edge solutions that keep Bot-Hive ahead of the competition. His expertise in autonomous flexible forming machinery is especially valuable in devising novel automation technologies and tactics that enhance manufacturers' process efficiency and flexibility.
Senior Automation Engineer
Having been inspired into robotics and automation from watching Robot Wars as a child, Sean obtained his degree in Mechatronic Engineering and subsequently joined B&R Industrial Automation. It was there that he was exposed to a wide variety of customers and industries and had first-hand experience of the benefits that scalable, flexible automation systems can have. Now at Bot-Hive, Sean brings his almost seven years of Controls and Automation experience to create the future of flexible automation.
Automation Engineer
Shubham aka Mr Automation lives and breathes automation. Born into the family of a highly regarded systems integration company, Shubham has been working with PLCs and advanced electronics for as early as he can remember.
Head of Research
A passionate robotics engineer at heart, Niv graduated in Robotics & Automation at the prestigious PSG College of Technology and mastered in Cybernetics & Robotics from Czech Technical University. Niv has worked on a number of projects for companies such as Eaton Corporation and Continental Automotive as a robotics programmer. She joined Bot-Hive in 2020 as a robotics data analyst. Her passion comes from applying technical knowledge to research whilst analyzing critical data to drive flexible automation advancements. Outside of Bot-Hive, Niv enjoys teaching across a number of STEM Programming 4 Kids schemes and delivers technical courses to higher education students.
Research Engineer
Having studied mechanical engineering in manufacturing, Shyam has been designing and building mechanical parts for the past five years. Shyam plays a critical role in analysing technologies before they are implemented onto the platform as well as designing and developing a number of key connectors and adapters for our future hardware library.
Content Lead
A seasoned editorial executive, Neil is responsible for Bot-Hives content and PR strategy. Having worked in city PR for 10 years, Neil cut his teeth in tecc having established him self as a resident contributor for leading publishing houses in fintech, AI, machine vision and most recently robotics.
Lead Adviser
Professor Peter Hofmann is the former CTO and board member at KUKA AG, one of the world’s leading robotics and automation companies. Prior to his time at KUKA AG, Peter led the global R+D department at FESTO AG and acted as SVP at Krones AG, the world’s leading contract manufacturer for drinks and liquid management. Peter is an engineer meets data scientist who started his career as a Manufacturing Engineer at Daimler AG.
Board Member
Dominic is the Founder and Managing Partner at Britbots and RAIA Ventures. He is the former Founder and CEO of MoPowered Plc, a marketing technology company that he founded in 2006 and listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2015. He holds a first class honours in Engineering from Cambridge University.
Does this sound like a bit of you?
Email CVs to [email protected]
