Today we are looking back at some team highlights from the past year. Despite the challenging circumstances we managed to accomplish some great achievements and make fun memories together in the process. We kicked of 2020 with two new hires: Paul joined us as Device Engineer and Moritz as Systems Engineer.
Being located on the bustling Harwell Campus, we managed to attend some cool events before the COVID-19 lockdown hit. At the Harwell Clean Energy conference, the team ran a fun interactive demo.
We are proud to be part of Harwell’s EnergyTec cluster along with 56 other cutting-edge companies. In early March, we collaborated with SubTera and GMV to deliver a proof-of-concept automated oil and gas pipeline corrosion inspection robot. You can read more about that here.
Photo by GMV
In March we also celebrated the women of the Archangel Group for International Women’s Day. Read more about the women of Archangel and their journey here. We managed to get a team photoshoot in on campus just in time…
And then… lockdown hit, and the Zoom calls started!
The tech team had to experiment with creative work from home set up. Here is our CTO Jonathan Mist running a calibration test from the sunny (hard to imagine now, I know) Oxfordshire countryside.
Despite the difficulties Covid-19 brought us, we were proud to be able to continue growing our talented team, and in June Luke joined us as Applications Tech Lead.
Whilst our award-winning AI camera systems were being used for all-in-one, challenging remote outdoor monitoring use cases like anti-poaching, railway theft and trespass prevention, with the impact of the pandemic all consuming, we focused on offering our technology to help complement security and safety teams to help them deal with the impact of COVID-19. The Feverscreen project kicked off in August with support and funding from Innovate UK and the Oxford Foundry.
In August, Rob joined us as Project Manager and later Tristan joined us as Production and Lab Manager.
We also joined some super exciting programmes; we were one of 32 companies chosen to join Tech Nation’s Applied AI 2.0 – a prestigious growth programme for Artificial Intelligence companies! Read more about what Applied AI 2.0 has in store for us here. We also joined NVIDIA Inception, a programme designed to nurture start-ups revolutionising industries with advancements in AI and data sciences. Read what our COO Trang had to say about the benefits of us joining NVIDIA Inception here.
With a second lockdown for England announced on Halloween itself, we enjoyed yet another Zoom social with a spooky Halloween quiz and best costume competition. Safe to say some took the competition more seriously than others… (I mean it really was all to play for with a £20 Archangel branded Amazon gift card at stake).
In November we continued to grow our team. James joined us as a Drones & Robotics Engineer across the pond from South Africa. Ellena joined us as a Virtual office manager. Outside of work, she enjoys going for walks with her 2-year-old daughter and loves reading poetry! Vinoth joined us as a Technical Lead Recruiter. Outside of work, he enjoys cars and bike modifications and tuning, reading, exercising, and football.
Whilst we were growing our talented team, we wanted to ensure we were nurturing our people too. Since the first lockdown we had been looking for ways to keep our people socially connected when we can’t be together in person. After some early experiments, we decided to get the everyone in the team early Christmas presents of the Virtual Reality headsets! We opted for the Oculus Quest 2 model in the end – find out more about why we chose to gift the team headsets here.
Also in November, we won grant funding from Innovate UK’s £191m Sustainable Innovation Fund to further develop our versatile AI & robotics remote monitoring and response technology!
2020 saw us graduate from the Oxford Foundry accelerator programme, and we were chosen as one of 12 start-ups to pitch live at the invite-only Demo Day premiere on November 12th 2020.
We closed off the year with a super fun Christmas social. We had a mind-reading guest, music and comedy performances from our very own, and of course a party in virtual reality with our new headsets!
We want to thank all our Archangel team for making it a great year of memories for us, despite the challenging circumstances - we got through it together. #ArchangelLife