The Kobi Company: EIC Accelerator Mower Brain Bought by Bosch

The Kobi Company no longer exists. On 11 December 2024 its sole shareholder dissolved the Leuven robotics firm and closed its liquidation in the same notarial act, according to the extract published in the Belgian Official Gazette; the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises lists enterprise 0628.837.439 as ceased since that day. The owner was Bosch. Robert Bosch GmbH appears as the consolidating parent in the company's 2021 accounts and its 2023 accounts, and a May 2024 announcement by the Belgian transmission firm Mazaro, which hired Kobi's founder as chief executive, says "the German multinational Bosch" took over the company at the start of 2021.

Two years before that takeover, the European Commission had selected Kobi in the 9 January 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the forerunner of the EIC Accelerator, according to the Commission's list of selected companies, where Kobi is the only company listed for the project. The project, BRAIN ("Building a Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Network"), received an EU contribution of €1,714,195.88 towards a total cost of €2,448,851.25, according to CORDIS. Its aim was a self-driving "Brain" that makers of mowers and other machines could build into their own equipment.

How the Company Ended

The end was planned months ahead. At a shareholders' meeting on 22 March 2024, Waelbers's company Topquark and the Bosch-era director Dieter Donis left the board with effect from 31 March, and two new directors, Bernhard Hegemann and Stijn Gielis, took over from 1 April, according to the Official Gazette. The notes to the 2023 accounts, approved in October 2024, say that "in April 2024 it was decided to close the subsidiary", and put the cost at €0.3 million in severance and €0.35 million in liquidation costs. The same notes value the company's intellectual property at €0.5 million and announce a €2.0 million capital increase to repay intra-group debt and the liquidation costs. In October 2024 the owner booked an additional equity contribution of €1,690,000, according to a notarial deed extract.

The December 2024 deed records that debts had been repaid or the necessary sums set aside, that the sole shareholder took back the remaining assets, and that the books are to be kept at an address in Boxtel in the Netherlands. Who bought the intellectual property, if anyone, is not public. The company's website is still online. On 7 October 2026 it still marketed "KobiVision" to equipment makers, and its footer carried injected spam links to online pharmacy pages.

The Technology: A Bolt-On Brain for Mowers

Kobi began as a consumer product. In September 2016 its three-in-one yard robot, which mowed lawns, collected leaves and blew snow with swappable attachments, won the Pitchfire start-up contest at RoboBusiness, and the company said ten beta units would be working in yards by the end of 2016, according to The Robot Report. In January 2017 Automation World reported a price of $3,999 and availability that year. No evidence of retail sales of that robot could be found.

By the time of the EU award the business model had changed. Rather than compete with established mower makers, Kobi offered them a navigation system to make their machines autonomous. Its website describes computer vision for localisation, path planning and obstacle detection that works under trees and next to buildings, where GPS signals are weak, and with no perimeter wire, which most consumer robot mowers still need. That was a change from the 2016 robot, which The Robot Report described as using GPS and sensors. The CORDIS objective claims the platform was patented; no patent in the company's name could be verified for this article.

The best-known result of that strategy was ATOM, a 74-inch electric zero-turn mower that the American maker Mean Green Mowers and Kobi presented at the GIE+EXPO trade show in Louisville in October 2019. Testing was to continue through 2020, with production of units planned by 2021, according to Landscape Management. No production launch of ATOM has been reported since. When Mean Green showed an autonomous version of its Vanquish mower at the 2023 Equip Exposition, the autonomy came from another start-up, Greenzie, according to Landscape Management.

What BRAIN Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

BRAIN ran from 1 April 2019 to 31 December 2020. The grant agreement was signed on 21 May 2019. The proposal promised to "fine-tune the Brain" and prepare a commercial scale-up, and it set out revenue forecasts of about €1 million in 2019, about €12 million by 2021 and €99 million by 2023, with staff growing from 7 to 125 full-time equivalents by 2023, according to the CORDIS fact sheet.

The final periodic report, covering April to December 2020, says Kobi "not only reached, but surpassed the milestones". It lists a user app, a fleet management dashboard with predictive maintenance, a generic API for equipment makers, several pilot projects and prototypes, a virtual test environment used when COVID-19 stopped physical testing, and a new circuit board designed to compliance standards. On the business side it lists market studies of lawn and garden, cleaning and golf in the EU and US, pricing models including robotics as a service, and "deals with large OEMs". The report names none of those equipment makers, and gives no sales figures. The deliverables are the company's own account; no independent test of them is public.

1. App, fleet dashboard and OEM APIDeliveredListed as completed in the CORDIS final report.
2. Pilot series and virtual test environmentDeliveredPilots and a professional prototype shown at GIE+EXPO, per CORDIS and Landscape Management.
3. Production-ready device for mass productionPartlyNew circuit board designed; certification and series production not reported.
4. OEM mower on the market (ATOM, production by 2021)Not achievedNo launch reported; Mean Green later used Greenzie's autonomy.
5. €12M revenue by 2021, €99M by 2023Not achievedNo revenue disclosed; the company was closed in 2024.
6. 125 staff by 2023Not achieved9.6 full-time equivalents on average in 2023.

The project closed on schedule and the technical work packages were reported complete, which is what an SME Instrument grant pays for. The commercial targets that justified the grant, the equipment-maker products, the revenue and the jobs, did not materialise in any public record.

After the Grant: Sold to Bosch

The filings trace the handover. On 30 September 2020, three months before BRAIN ended, convertible loans of €547,206.03 were converted into 2,691 new preferred shares, and €789,417.29 of accumulated losses was written off against the company's capital, according to the Official Gazette. On 7 January 2021 the share transfer rules and board rules were rewritten, Ewen resigned as director, Donis, a German national living in Leonberg near Stuttgart, joined the board, and EY was appointed auditor, with the formalities handled by the law firm Ashurst, according to a second Gazette extract. The 2020 accounts, filed in August 2021, state that the company had received a guarantee of financial support from its parent.

Neither Bosch nor Kobi announced the deal, and its price is not public. Waelbers stayed for three more years as head of the robotics department at Bosch, according to the Mazaro announcement, which gives 2016 as the year he founded the company; the register shows the legal entity was incorporated in April 2015 under another name and took the Kobi name in September 2016. No Bosch product has been publicly linked to Kobi's technology.

The Money

Under Bosch, Kobi worked as a small development unit with losses funded by its parent. Its last three sets of accounts, abbreviated filings that do not disclose turnover, show net losses of €439,539 in 2021, €679,814 in 2022 and €116,187 in 2023, according to the 2022 and 2023 filings with the National Bank of Belgium. Equity, already negative at the end of 2019, fell to minus €1,584,728 at the end of 2023, against €2.43 million of other short-term debts; the 2023 notes refer to intra-group debts that a capital increase was to repay. Gross margin, the closest public measure of activity, was €1.88 million in 2023, against personnel costs of €1.19 million.

Why Europe Should Care

Kobi's pitch addressed two European concerns at once: labour shortages in outdoor manual work and the shift from petrol to electric machines, which its final report said its technology helped with by making devices run "3x more efficient". The EU's Coordinated Plan on Artificial Intelligence seeks European leadership in applied AI, and the new Machinery Regulation sets safety rules for machines that act with less human control, the category autonomous mowers fall into.

The outcome is a familiar one for EU-funded start-ups: a European industrial group absorbed the team and the technology, then shut the entity. That kept the know-how in a European company, but it ended Kobi's plan to be an independent supplier to the whole equipment industry, and nothing public shows what became of the technology after 2024.

The Verdict

The Kobi Company, its former founder and Bosch have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.