Overview
Ali Junaid is the founder and CEO of effecon, a company he founded in January 2025, and is based in Leuven. Since September 2024 he has also been a product owner at BASF.
Before that he was a project manager at Colruyt Group Smart Technics from August 2022 to August 2024. He spent three years at Flanders Make, joining in September 2019 as an associate robotics application engineer, becoming a robotics application engineer in April 2021 and then a project manager from August 2021 to July 2022. Earlier he was a technical project manager at Unmanned Life, a research associate at KU Leuven from 2017 to 2019, a research associate at Kingston University, a consultant robotics engineer at Aidrivers Ltd., a researcher at Gyeongsang National University from 2013 to 2016 and an intern at Pakistan Aeronautical Complex.
He holds a PhD in industrial engineering technology from KU Leuven, a master's degree in control systems engineering from Gyeongsang National University and a bachelor's degree in mechatronics from Air University.
Career history
In the news
- The interesting part here is not the calibration. It is that nothing in ThRiVer changed between different robot brands. Thanks to Dardi Shehu at Yaskawa Benelux for arranging the robot arm. Getting a second brand in front of the software this early is what turns vendor-agnostic from a design intention into something we can actually show.
- The least glamorous jobs are usually the ones worth automating first. Hand-eye calibration won't excite anyone. But dull, easy-to-get-wrong tasks are exactly where a team loses its time. Take enough of them off the plate, and automation starts to pay for itself. #ThRiVer #Effecon #IndustrialRobotics #PhysicalAI
- Great opportunity for state-of-the-art robotics research, and I can vouch for Omar Al-Ahmad as a sharp, competent professor to work under.
- Intelligent Robotics. Made Accessible! Four words we've been chasing. It means you describe the job and the cell works out the rest. No code, no specialist, no months project. You can see it running at www.effecon.be
- We keep saying accessible robotics. This is what we mean by it. Shiny metal in a bin is one of the hardest picking problems there is. Solving it from a CAD file in an afternoon, on standard cameras, is the difference between a lab demo and something a mid-sized shop can actually run.
- I keep meeting integrators who turn away customers, not because the work is hard, but because the setup takes too long to be worth it. When that changes, the whole market changes with it.
- For decades, robotics belonged to whoever could afford the integration project. That era is ending. Automation is becoming something a mid-sized company can actually justify. That is the shift we are building for.
- What a week! 2 weeks ago, we were pitching at LogiLaunch organized at LOGIVILLE. Since then, we have been on site continuously. The conversations that started did not stay conversations. They turned into back-to-back site visits. 🏭 New facilities. 🤝 New faces. 💡 Real problems to solve. The biggest takeaway? Companies are not asking if they should automate anymore. They are asking how, in a way that is practical, flexible, and delivers value from day one. That is exactly the kind of conversation we love having. A huge
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