Ambyon

Ambyon is a Dutch health-tech company in Eindhoven that develops autonomous mobile robots for hospital logistics, trading through the legal entity Ambee B.V. Chief executive Willem-Jan Lamers founded it in 2022 with chief technology officer Joep Selten, drawing on his robotics background after seeing how staff shortages in hospital aftercare affected his own family. The company argues that nurses and other care professionals lose up to two hours a day fetching medication, samples and supplies, and builds robots to take over that hidden logistics work. It is based in Building 54 at Het Eeuwsel 2 in Eindhoven, and its team page lists 15 people.

Its product is Ambyon ONE, a hospital delivery robot that moves medication, laboratory samples, pumps and other shared equipment, nutrition and supplies between wards, pharmacies, laboratories and other departments. It operates elevators and doors on its own, travels at up to 1.5 m/s to match walking pace, and is designed for crowded corridors: it predicts human movement, for example a bed or wheelchair coming through an opening door, avoids stopping in doorways and signals its intentions through movement and cues. A single storage compartment is loaded by the sender and opened only by authorised staff after secure login, while real-time location, progress and estimated arrival times are reported to users. Staff can move or control the robot manually when needed, and deployment requires no changes to hospital infrastructure. Payload, battery runtime and dimensions are not published.

Pilots named on the company site include Elkerliek hospital in Helmond and AZ Voorkempen in Belgium, and a Frontrunners consortium of healthcare institutions supports further deployment. In April 2026 the robot was reported active in four hospitals with a fifth expected, saving more than an hour per care professional per day, and it has had initial practical testing at Erasmus MC in Rotterdam. Ambyon ONE won the Brainport preliminary round and the public award of the Nationale Zorginnovatieprijs 2026.

Ambyon takes part in several publicly funded research consortia. CareBOTS, financed through the OPZuid 2021-2027 program by the European Regional Development Fund, the Dutch government and the Province of North Brabant, brings together NL Robotics, TU/e, Erasmus MC, Radboudumc, TNO and others. ZorgBots started in 2022 with Venamics, TNO, TU/e and Starnus; Interreg CAMoRo develops a platform for collaborative AMRs across the Netherlands and Flanders; and the KIEM HighTech project Replicate, funded by Regieorgaan SIA until August 2027, uses Gaussian splatting simulation of hospital environments to train safe robot navigation. Commercial partners include Alphatron Medical and Breda Robotics.