Successful robotics industry draws startups to Odense
To develop a robot that is easy to program and that can navigate on its own using GPS and an internal map—and then five years later to sell the company Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR) for DKK 1.7 billion. It is a feat that all entrepreneurs in the Danish robotics cluster dream of repeating.
While the founder, Niels Jul Jacobsen, has long since thrown himself into a new robotics project in Capra Robotics, MiR was sold to the American Teradyne group in 2018, following in the footsteps of another big robot manufacturer from Funen, Universal Robots (UR). UR was acquired by Teradyne in 2015 and recently reached 1,000 employees after expanding at a pace rarely seen here in Denmark.
Next year, the two companies will get a joint headquarters, and according to MiR Chief Operating Officer Lars Mastrup, the joint address will strengthen the synergies between the development departments in MiR and Universal Robots.
“We already exchange skills, i.e. people, with UR when we can, and also borrow from each other. That’s the kind of thing that makes sense when you have the same owner—you both have people who know what it means to build robots and you don’t have to bring someone in off the street and train them,” he says.
A robot package deal
Søren Peter Johansen, robotics expert and technology manager at the Danish Technological Institute, also sees great opportunities for synergies between the two companies, even though Universal Robots’s robotic arms differ somewhat from MiR’s mobile transport robots:
“It’s a big advantage that they can team up because they have the same customer segment—they just have different technologies. So you can grab a robotic arm and a mobile robot, and then you can practically sell both to the same customer. Huge advantage!”
He points to another common feature of the two companies, namely that they do not build solutions, but platforms, which a number of other Danish robotics companies then build on top of with applications that enable the robots to solve increasingly more tasks.
“You could say that the robot is just a mobile phone, to which some apps need to be added. For example, Universal Robots has created the UR+ ecosystem that anyone can develop tools for. OnRobot is one of the companies that is focusing heavily on it. They started by making tools for UR, but they have made them generic so that they can also be used for many other robots,” Søren Peter Johansen says.
“Another example is Enable Robots, whose software connect a MiR and an UR together, so you can have a robotic arm that moves around picking things and delivering them elsewhere in the company.”
Mobile Industrial Robots is a debutant in Ingeniøren’s Profile Analysis
| Ranking in 2023 | +/- | |
| Total image | 25 | new |
| Influence and independence | 7 | new |
| Development and innovation | 7 | new |
| Career and competence development | 14 | new |
| Salary and benefits | 16 | new |
| Professional challenges | 20 | new |
| Management and corporate culture | 27 | new |
| Business-oriented management | 27 | new |
| Balance between work and family life | 33 | new |
| Products of particularly high quality | 39 | new |
| Responsibility towards surroundings, environment, and climate | 49 | new |
| Unity and cooperation | 54 | new |
| Knowledge | 83 | new |
MiR itself sells few top modules for its mobile robots: MiR Hook, which, as the name suggests, has a hook so that the robot can pull a cart, and Pallet Lift, which enables it to lift e.g. pallets. But in the MiR Go ecosystem, customers can add everything from shelf systems and conveyor belts to disinfection devices, which are produced by third-party companies—in many cases smaller start-up companies.
According to Lars Mastrup, some of the products are created in collaboration with the manufacturer—MiR tests them with its robots. In other cases, they are simply marketed by the manufacturer on MiR Go, without MiR being involved.
Illustration: Mir.
Odense is a strong brand
One of the strengths of the Danish robotics industry, which according to the national robotics and drone cluster Odense Robotics counts approx. 400 companies with a total of 15,000 jobs, is precisely the strong tradition of collaboration.
“64 percent of the companies work together with the research and education community, and 84 percent work together with other companies,” says Mikkel Christoffersen, outgoing CEO of Odense Robotics.
135 of the 400 robotics companies are located in the Odense area, and this provides a critical mass of robotics skills, which has partly made Odense synonymous with robots—also abroad—and partly acts as a magnet for Danish robotics entrepreneurs.
“Both MiR and UR are strong examples of exits where the new owner is also oriented towards the ecosystem and contributes, for example by continuing to develop the company with new products and large investments in development cooperation,” Mikkel Christoffersen says.
“Historically, there have been so many examples of successful robotics companies that come from Odense’s ecosystem, and this is the journey that many companies elsewhere in the country have also wanted to be a part of.”
Investor: Move to Odense
A good example of this is the company Subblue Robotics, which has for several years been working on developing a remote-controlled underwater robot that can polish propellers on large ships and remove fouling. A task that is otherwise performed by divers with a high hourly wage.
When Ingeniøren visited the two entrepreneurs Don Fischer and Michael Hermansen three years ago, they were using a commercial property in Charlottenlund that their main investor had made available to them. But in 2021, they had to admit that there was no way around moving to Odense. They are now based at Odense Science Park, together with other robotics entrepreneurs.
“Everything that has to do with robots takes place in Odense, after all. We had to go from the stage where it was just Michael and me to building up an organisation, but when you talk about hardware in Copenhagen, everyone shakes their head and thinks: ‘Oh no, you can’t make money on that,’” says Don Fischer, CEO of Subblue Robotics.
“But here in Odense there are people who have tried it and know that it can be done. So we talked to some investors from Odense and got hold of Thomas Visti—the man who has helped build up both Universal Robots and MiR. And he said: ‘If I’m going to invest in you, you have to move to Odense.’ So I had to move my wife and child and ex-wife and the whole shebang to Nyborg,” he says.
Illustration: Mir.
This helped get Thomas Visti and Universal Robots’s founder, Esben Østergaard, on board as investors and on the board of directors, where the chairman is another successful entrepreneur, Ralf Astrup, who in 2016 sold the food automation company Cabinplant to a company controlled by Warren Buffet. He has also invested in Subblue Robotics.
“We have some of the biggest representatives in the company. I talk to them daily, and Esben Østergaard helps us in technical terms,” Don Fischer says.
In addition to commercial and professional exchange of ideas, the new address also provides access to top-qualified labour. An electronics engineer, a robotics technician, and a software engineer have been snatched from Blue Ocean Robotics, and their task is to help realise the ambition of a commercial product in 2024.
“We had reached a level where we needed help to make it better, and we are trying to hire people who are better than ourselves,” Don Fischer says and also emphasises the proximity of Odense Science Park to the start-up Blue Atlas Robotics, which is developing an underwater robot for video inspections.
“We share knowledge with them every single day, both about components and experiences with suppliers, etc. The advantage is that if you need feedback or have technical questions, people with knowledge about robots all live in Odense or the surrounding area,” he says.
SDU as a feeding channel
Odense’s brand as a city of robotics also means that many foreign students come to the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) to study robotics. This helps get new people with robotic skills for the companies.
“For example, only here at MiR, we have really many different nationalities and employees who have come to Odense because of robots,” Lars Mastrup says.
As COO, he has, among other things, responsibility for industrializing and scaling up production after the September 2022 merger with another Teradyne-owned company, AutoGuide in Kentucky. Their portfolio of autonomous mobile robots capable of lifting a very heavy load will not be carried over, but the company’s know-how will be carried over into new MiR products.
“The merger will certainly contribute to expanding our product portfolio, and AutoGuide’s and MiR’s products fit together well. A MiR robot can move around a production facility, but cannot actually lift a pallet from the ground,” Lars Mastrup says.
All robots must run on the same software platform so that they can be part of the same fleet.
“The difficult thing is not to control the individual robot, but managing a large factory where you have 50 robots of different types with the same software management tool. If you don’t do it the right way, they create traffic jams. It becomes like children’s football, where everyone runs for the ball.”
MiR’s debut in 25th place in this year’s Profile Analysis is also proof that MiR itself has long since moved up from the junior to the professional league of engineering companies.
