39. Hausbots

Young Entrepreneur Award Shortlisted

To recognise and support brilliant young innovators aged 25 and under who are here to solve the next generation’s challenges with their inspiring business ideas.

Startups 100: Young Entrepreneur Awards

Founders: Jack Cornes and Harry Smith
Founded: 2018
Website: hausbots.com

Let’s be honest, health and safety has improved massively in the past couple of decades. We’re far from the days of the iconic Lunch atop a Skyscraper photograph, where workers would be made to work hundreds of metres in the air with minimal safety oversight. However, Hausbots is looking to make the world even safer by making sure workers don’t have to climb anything at all.

Founded in the West Midlands in 2018, Hausbots was formed as a response to dangerous, expensive, and time-consuming manual labour that needs to be done on the outside of tall buildings or structures. Its robots are able to quickly scale a building and perform a number of tasks, like painting, cleaning, and overall maintenance.

The HB1 (standing for Hausbot 1) is the company’s first and only model, but it’s already capable of some very impressive feats. By using 42kg of suction power, it seals itself to the wall and uses wheels to ascend. It can climb steel, brick, concrete, and is unaffected by imperfections like welds, rivets, and wires. It is controlled by a worker with their feet firmly on the ground, using a built in camera to perform the intended job once it’s where it needs to be.

Robots are able to quickly scale a building and perform a number of tasks, like painting, cleaning, and overall maintenance

The HB1’s main uses thus far have been covering up graffiti, surveying concrete quality, and fixing up painting imperfections, but over time, it’s easy to see how this could evolve into more complex tasks, like soldering wires or filling in structural imperfections.

As a business, how high can Hausbots climb? They’re looking far ahead, to a time when it will seem outlandish that we ever expected human beings to climb to such an elevation.

Hausbots wants to be at the forefront of this cultural shift, keeping its eyes on things like the $2 trillion Biden Infrastructure Bill, which has a big focus on technology in the facility and asset management industry.