A Blyth, Northumberland-based company that designs and builds advanced robots and machines for customers such as Ocado, and helped create the robots in its automated warehouses.
Tharsus designs and makes robots and automated machines for other companies. It describes its job as building what it calls strategic machines, and its mission as being "the best Strategic Machine maker on the planet". Instead of selling a product of its own, it works with customers to turn an idea into a machine that can be made in numbers. Its best-known partnership is with the online supermarket Ocado, which Tharsus has worked with since 2012 to help design the autonomous warehouse robots at the heart of Ocado's operations. It has also done engineering work on Connect-R, a modular robot for building emergency structures. Ocado is already on the PURPOSE site.
The group was founded by Brian Palmer, who a 2022 article says continues in his role as strategy and innovation lead. In January 2022 the group appointed Joni Rautavuori as chief executive; he had 25 years of experience in industrial automation, including leading ABB's global robots business from the UK. The group also includes Universal Wolf, a metal fabrication company. Its listing says it takes a pragmatic view of robotics hype, looking for what will really benefit a business and building from there. We did not find a longer statement of values than that.
Tharsus is based in Blyth, Northumberland, where its production facility is, and in 2019 it was planning a new headquarters in the county. It was named Company of the Year at the 2019 North East Business Awards and was selected for Tech Nation's Future Fifty programme for late-stage growing companies. The Welcome to the Jungle listing puts its size at 101 to 200 employees, which is undated. It lists clients including Ocado, BT and 3M. Blyth is on the Northumberland coast, so this is a chance for robotics work outside the south-east of England.
On culture, the same listing describes hybrid and remote working, regular team off-sites, 10% of working time set aside for learning, a training budget, an early finish on Fridays and 25 days of holiday plus the employee's birthday off. It also gives the share of women on staff as 17%, and mentions that during the pandemic Tharsus made a social-distancing product called Bump as a way to "do the right thing". These are statements from a profile page, not independent checks.
Roles in a company that designs and builds robots include mechanical, electrical and software engineers, controls and computer vision specialists, manufacturing and quality engineers, people who assemble and test machines, project managers, and finance and support staff. Subjects such as engineering, maths, physics and computing are the usual starting points. Because it builds machines for a range of customers, an engineer there might work on very different products in the same year.
Website: www.tharsus.com
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