meet the builders
The founder building a humanoid for 15x less than the next cheapest. The engineer who flew a drone with a robotic arm. People a careers fair never shows you.
- Photo: A wheel-legged robot dog climbing a staircase.
- Clip: Hands on the arm of a humanoid robot, then its head up close.
- Photo: Builders at laptops in a lecture theatre.
- Photo: A man holding a controller beside a waving humanoid robot.
- Clip: A hand on a small black device on a table, then its maker explaining how it works.
- Photo: Two guests laughing together.
- Photo: A visitor with a humanoid robot, smiling.
- Photo: Two builders working at one laptop.
- Clip: A wheeled robot dog being carried up a staircase by a person.
- Photo: Four builders round a table with laptops.
- Photo: Guests in close conversation.
- Clip: A humanoid robot in a busy hall, then a drone with a robotic arm on a table with people round it.
- Photo: Two people with a humanoid robot.
For founders, engineers, tinkerers and students building robots, rockets and everything in between.
our members come from
builders from Oxford to Glasgow, and well beyond.
Every member applied with what they've built. Some run companies. Some are on their first project. More than half live outside London.
- 65+universities across the UK, Europe and North America
- 50+cities
- 1,000+attendees across 7+ events
- £1m+raised by members
“Now serving over 13 million users and counting.”
Built a Discord bot that runs in 48,000+ servers. It has since passed 14 million users.
Third year, Liverpool “We have amassed over 280k+ users. We are approaching Series A.”
Works on growth and marketing at a fast growing startup, and founded its ambassador programme.
Second year, Imperial “It was benchmarked against GPT-4 and GPT-5 and it was on par with GPT-5 in accuracy… Also outperformed GPT-5 in engagement for kids.”
Student, Birmingham Co-founded an agentic AI startup for clinics in the medical field. A £112,000 revenue pipeline in 4 months, and now live with paying clinics at £26k ARR.
Student, UCL “Created one of the most accurate black hole visualisations ever at the time… it still took 3 months straight of computing for the final simulation.”
First year, King's College London “[During my PhD,] I developed an idea into a commercially viable product that is 100 times better than existing incumbents. This research led to 2 patents and a potential spinout in near future.”
Also trained as a patent attorney during the PhD.
PhD, Oxford
why Labs exists.
AI made software cheap to build. So the hard problems moved to robots, chips, energy and the factories that make them.
The people building them are already here. They're just spread out.
Labs puts them in the same room.
what Labs is.
get into the room
Founder sessions, hackathons, panels and demos, set up so you actually meet people.
turn it into something
A co-founder. A part time role on a live build. A place on a programme.
things actually happen here.
Deep Tech London Summit, 93 Feet East (opens in a new tab)
500 founders, engineers, scientists and investors, with talks from founders at Callosum, Rivan and BioOrbit.
Hard tech session, Muslim Tech Fest
Great hardware companies get linked with San Francisco and Shenzhen. This session put London's hardware founders, and their machines, on the table.
Claude AI hackathon, Cambridge (opens in a new tab)
Machines of Loving Grace: an 8 hour hackathon with Anthropic. Idea to working product in a single day.
1 million young people into meaningful opportunities by 2030.
what people have said.
Andrew Choi, 6mo
Last week, I led the organisation of the 2026 Claude AI Hackathon in Cambridge, and one decision shaped the entire event: making it just 8 hours long.
The idea came from my experience at HackEurope, where I noticed something that's becoming increasingly common - participants were finishing their MVPs within a couple of hours, then spending the remaining 30+ hours polishing or, frankly, just waiting for it to end. AI has made building so fast that traditional hackathon formats no longer feel like a real challenge. And if a hackathon isn't challenging, what's the point?
So we flipped the format. Eight hours. That's it. The goal was to create genuine time pressure - the kind that forces you to think strategically about how you use AI, not just throw prompts at it and hope for the best. Run out of Claude Code sessions? You're in trouble. The constraint pushes participants to work smarter: planning before building, writing precise prompts, and getting quality code out of AI rather than quantity.
I think this reflects where the software industry is
Alexis Kusikwenyu, 9mo
I recently attended Tomorrow’s Intelligence: The Next Era of Robotics, AI & Startups, and it was honestly such an inspiring experience.
As a student with a growing interest in AI, it was exciting to learn how robotics and machine learning are evolving together. Hearing from founders and innovators really opened my eyes to how much opportunity there is in the industry.
I am still early in my journey, but events like this remind me why I’m so passionate about technology and its potential to improve people’s lives.
Feeling grateful and excited for what I’ll learn next! Thank you KCL Robotics, Uncookedjobs and NextGen Ri #AI #Robotics #Innovation #Engineering
Tofu Oludare, 5mo, Edited
We won! 🏆🏆🏆 Last week I walked into a room full of strangers at the two-day Agentic Society hackathon, hosted by Hedera and The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) with 240+ registered participants and 20+ teams competing. I walked out with a co-founder and a product we are taking forward.
Patrick Belinga and I met that night, different backgrounds but same instincts to leverage technology to solve problems. Four hours before final submission, we pivoted for the third time, scrapped everything and built something neither of us had planned to build but meant so much more to us. What came out is APEX AUDIT. Trustless infrastructure for keeping AI decisions honest and verifiable in a world where regulation demands it.
Thank you to the organisers for creating a space where building and thinking could happen in the same room, and even more for their Jedi guidance overnight. Jake Hall Matt Hindhaugh Luke Forrest We’re taking this forward as a startup. Enormously grateful. Enormously excited.
Kaustubh Joshi, 11mo, Edited
I just went to Cambridge to listen to James He hosted by Cambridge University Artificial Intelligence Research Society (CUAIRS) and CUTEC - Cambridge University Technology and Enterprise Club.
Insights on how James went from his undergrad at Cambridge in behaviour sciences to Y.C + co - founding Artificial Societies -> raising £5M in funding.
Key lessons were 1. Investment doesn't mean anything 2. No one truly has it figured out 3. Launch early, ship fast, talk to customers, don't die and one more?
We also got 50 dollars free of Claude api credits + pro account, so goated.
Thanks to Abdullah Mansuri from Sparq for inviting me. Thanks to Annur Ababil, Ashwin S. Hathiramani for hosting this event.
Rex H., 5mo, Edited
The lads and I built Too Good To Go but R2R (restaurant to restaurant) and S2S (supermarket to supermarket) using a fully agentic economy on Hedera; essentially trading excess inventory stock in a live commodities market. We found out UK hospitality wastes 920,000 tonnes of food a year, and in addition, food waste reporting is self-declared and often unverifiable. At the Hedera Agentic Society hackathon this weekend at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), we built Peel 🍏 to enhance waste data in a public ledger.
Peel is a tokenised food-waste marketplace where AI agents negotiate surplus inventory on behalf of restaurants. Each kitchen has its own LLM-powered trader agent. When one restaurant has excess rice or flour, its agent publishes an offer to Hedera's Consensus Service. Other agents evaluate the offer against their own inventory policy, counter-offer in natural language, and if terms are met, settle the trade on Hedera Token Service. Four commodity tokens (rice, pasta, flour, oil) move between wallets on testnet.
The part I'm pretty happy about is the scale of
Video still: See SAM in action. The dashboard shown reads My dashboard, Connect as a human or an agent.
Trushi Patel, 5mo
🚀 Pushed my boundaries this weekend - building at the intersection of Agentic AI, Blockchain, and Cybersecurity. At Agentic Society: Panels by Day, Hackathon by Night at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), I stepped into one of the most intense and exciting builder environments I’ve experienced. And instead of staying in one lane… I combined Agentic AI + Blockchain + Cybersecurity into a single system.
⚡ Introducing: SAM - Sovereign Agent Mesh A public marketplace where AI agents hire, pay, and
questions you probably have.
Is Labs only for hardware founders?
No. Hardware, robotics and deep tech are the focus, but startups need operators, designers and people who sell too. If you want to work on hard problems, you belong here.
Do I need experience?
No. When you apply, we look at what you've built or done and how serious you are about it, not your CV. Some members run companies. Some are looking for their first project.
How do I join?
Apply through the form and tell us what you're building. It's free.
Does it cost anything?
No. It's free.
Is Labs London only?
No. More than half our members live outside London, plus members across Europe and North America. Most rooms are in London for now, and we're taking them to more cities.
the next frontier needs more people in the room.
You don't need the right university or the perfect CV. If you want to build in hardware, deep tech or robotics, or work in a startup, come build with us.
