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J

James Bergstra

Co-founder, Kindred AI

AI

James Bergstra co-founded Kindred, the robotics company that trained warehouse robots to pick individual items, and was its chief scientific officer and later head of AI research. Before Kindred, Bergstra developed the Theano and Hyperopt machine learning software and earned a PhD in machine learning from the University of Montreal in 2011. Ocado acquired Kindred in 2020.

James hasn’t spoken on a TechTO, TechVancouver or TechWaterloo stage. This profile is here because James co-founded Kindred AI, which appears in 1 talk in the archive.

Quick answers

Did James Bergstra co-found Kindred?

Yes. Kindred's own team page, as archived on 2016-10-31, describes James Bergstra as a co-founder and chief scientific officer who oversaw the development of Kindred's machine learning technology.

What did Bergstra work on before Kindred?

Kindred's archived team page (2016-10-31) says Bergstra was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Waterloo and a research scholar at Harvard, developed the Theano and Hyperopt software packages, and earned a PhD in machine learning from the University of Montreal in 2011.

What was Bergstra's role later at Kindred?

The University of Alberta reported on 2019-11-12 that Bergstra, cofounder of Kindred and head of AI research, spoke for the company when Kindred donated an industrial robotic arm to the university's Department of Computing Science.

Was Bergstra part of the Ocado acquisition?

Warehouse Automation reported on 2020-11-02 that Ocado named James Bergstra, Co-Founder and Head of AI Research, among the key individuals who had to remain employed at Kindred Systems for the acquisition to close.

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Maintained by TechTO · facts sourced and dated · last reviewed Sep 25, 2026