Company announcement
Findest acquires Hives, bringing employee, customer and product insight closer to the R&D lab.
Findest, the Amsterdam-based AI platform for R&D workflows, has acquired Hives, the Stockholm and Amsterdam platform that captures what a company’s own people and customers can already see, bringing the inside and outside views of an R&D decision into one place.
The R&D value chain is fragmented, its workflow and software split across disconnected tools. This acquisition is the first step toward changing that.
Findest is very good at finding the technology. Hives is the best at the part that comes first, knowing what you’re actually looking for, which mountains are worth climbing.
Open innovation runs in a sequence. First you decide what you want, then you find the technology, then you get it, manage it, and put it to work. Findest answers what exists in the world. Hives captures the insight from your colleagues, your suppliers, and your customers, the part that tells you where to look.
A lot of our customers tell us, “We want to find technologies, but we don’t know what to search for yet.” Our best customers know exactly what to search for. Hives lets every company act like our best customers, based on real insights from real people.
Hives also has a rare gift for simplicity. It’s the kind of tool you can forward to hundreds of people, and they’ll know where to click and hand back the right insight without any explanation. Their CTO and CEO are magicians, doing things with AI that many teams would struggle to pull off.
This is an acquisition, and Findest is the bigger player. What we really want is everything Hives knows in their focus area, so together we can help our customers shape the world we need now.
Vincent FrankenCo-founder and CEO, Findest
How innovation runs
Want, find, get, manage
Open innovation runs in a sequence, and the expensive mistake happens at the start. Hives owns the first step. Findest owns the second.
Watch
A minute with the founders
What Hives is
The signal from the people closest to the work
The people who know what’s actually working are usually the ones closest to it. The operators, shop floor, warehouse, marketing. The people talking to customers and working with a company’s products every day. They see the problems and the successes first, and they rarely have a way to be heard, so this intelligence dies in an email or in a workshop everyone’s forgotten by Friday.
Hives gives that knowledge a route. A manager asks the right people a real question, and the answers come back as something you can act on. It was built deliberately simple, because the tools that get shelved are the ones nobody wants to use.
Across the board
Built for breadth across industries
Findest indexes research across hundreds of industries. Hives runs in 100+ European companies, from manufacturing to the public sector. Together we’re guiding R&D to better results.
Manufacturing
Energy
Chemicals
Semiconductors
Sustainability
AerospaceThe two halves
One decision, seen from both sides
Outside · Findest
What exists in the world
The scientific papers and studies, where technology is heading across hundreds of industries.
Inside · Hives
What your own people see
The signal from those closest to the customer and the product, who notice what’s working and breaking first.
One complete R&D decision. Both halves, now in one place.
What this means for you
Both engines, working for the same call
“As founders, we can’t build everything. You find the players in other parts of the R&D value chain and you put them under one roof so it integrates. Customers told us they want to capture ideas from colleagues and users before they develop a technology. We used to say that’s not us. Now we can say it is us.”
“The moment I’m most excited about is when the two halves meet. A problem comes up from inside a company, and right there you see what’s happening out in the world that could solve it. Findest can read more research than any analyst team you could hire. Hives can make sense of the signal from thousands of people inside and outside an organisation. Both engines working for the one person trying to make a good call.”
Talk to us
Curious what the inside and outside views look like in one place? Book a call with the Findest team, or with the Hives team, and we’ll show you.