BOW closes £4m seed round
BOW, the universal robotics software company has successfully closed a £4 million seed round, led by Northern Gristone, the investment business focused on science and technology businesses in the North of England.
This news follows the appointment of Liz Upton, Co-Founder of Raspberry Pi in November 2024.
BOW looks to address the issues facing the robotics industry, more specifically the high cost and compelxity of programming robotics – a task that requires the expertise of specialised roboticists. Additionally, applications developed for one model of robot lack portability to different models of robot, which slow doen innovation and adoption.
The BOW platform and BOW robot-agnostic software development kit (SDK) solve these issues, making it possible to program different robots using the operating system and programming language of choice.
With BOW, software developers can create and deploy robotics applications, port applications between different makes of robots and manage and orchestrate robot fleets. By eradicating the need for highly-specialised robotics programmers, BOW’s platform allows generalist software developers to create, manage and deploy complex robotics applications and opens up new use cases in sectors previously underserved by robotics.
Originally spun out from the University of Sheffield in 2020, BOW is now working with OEMs, system integrators and software development houses who are using the platform and SDK to accelerate robotics innovation and application development.
“Northern Gritstone is delighted to support BOW’s team, who once again demonstrate that world-leading technology businesses are being created in the North of England. BOW’s groundbreaking robotics platform is a perfect example of innovation in the region born out of the University of Sheffield’s world-class academic research,” said Duncan Johnson, CEO of Northern Gritstone.
“The robotics market is growing fast, but that growth would be exponentially higher if the tremendous cost and complexity of programming robots were reduced. Robotics has an almost unlimited potential to help humanity solve global challenges, but the world simply can’t afford to wait for robotics to standardise around a single operating system and coding language,” commented Nick Thomspon, CEO of BOW. “BOW’s universal software platform and SDK elegantly solve this intractable problem by enabling any software developer to program various types of robots using the coding language of their choice, make portable applications and enable easy interoperability between any make and model of robot.
“This £4 million seed investment, led by Northern Gritstone, will be used to build on our strong commercial traction to date, expand our brilliant team and accelerate our product development so we can unleash the full potential of robotics for the betterment of our world.”
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