Edward Bot moves to Leuven Machine Learning startup NannyML

The former Google CEO for Belgium and Luxembourg will help scale Leuven-based NannyML. It develops tools to keep machine learning efficient.

Heverlee’s NannyML monitors AI models and reports or corrects them when they slow down. The company does this with an open source culture and a team of data scientists. The business model is primarily aimed at companies that want to use its technology and pay for support or additional functionality.

“It’s a typical open source culture with open science. They give a lot to the community and in turn make the technology bigger. That’s what Google does with Tensorflow, or how a company like MongoDB does,” Bott tells Data News.

NannyML has been around since 2020 and also raised capital that year. Today, it already counts a number of big names among its clients, including AWS, Pinterest, Walmart, UBS, Euroclear, TUI, and DeepMind. “It’s a product for companies that already have AI in full production,” says Bott. The company is led by Hakim Akhras, who founded it with Wiljan Coles and Wojtek Koperski.

Bot officially holds the title of chief revenue officer. Although he sees his role more as someone who will scale the company. “NannyML has a lot of data scientists, very technical profiles who are creating great technology. My job is to help their company grow with my knowledge and skills. The exact title attached to it is less important.”

From tech giant to startup

Bot left Google at the end of 2023, where he had been a regional director for ten years. He had been the point of contact for Google Cloud, where (former) country director Thierry Geerts led the business operations. He is thus replacing one of the world’s largest tech companies with a startup.

For Bot, it was also a moment of reflection. “I basically did nothing and thought a lot in the last months: writing a book, cycling, playing tennis, kite surfing, spending time with my family. But inaction is the midwife to something beautiful! It seems. “I’ve known for some time that I wanted to go into the startup world and NannyML was a hidden gem for me and now I want to help develop it.”