Victor Borja — Product × Robotics

Victor Borja Guimera

Product for technology that touches the physical world.

I'm a robotics engineer who became a product manager because I kept wanting to own the whole problem — the hardware, the software, and the decision about what's worth building. Nine years across control systems, clinical robotics, and B2B platforms; currently shaping the integration ecosystem at Frontify.

IROS 2022 published robotics research EPFL medical robot, 0 → clinical pilots 2× ARR, twice as first PM at Timly ≈100 integrations one ecosystem at Frontify

Fig. 01 — Live system Ball-balancing robot, planar model · state-feedback control @ 240 Hz running

θ lean 0.0°

ẋ ball 0.00 m/s

τ motor 0.0 N·m

balanced for 0.0 s

wind 0 N

Crashed. Even feedback linearization has limits.

A planar cousin of my master thesis — Control of a Ball-Balancing Robot (Aalborg University, 2020): five degrees of freedom, three actuators, an underactuated MIMO system modeled with quaternion dynamics, estimated by unscented Kalman filters, and stabilized by nonlinear feedback linearization. This demo runs a 2-DOF simplification with LQR-style state feedback. Click the canvas or use ←/→ to shove it. Add wind and notice the steady-state lean — this controller has no integral action. The full treatment (and why the humble EKF beat my fancy UKF) is in the thesis.

Ambiguous technical problem, shipped product. Four times.

EPFL · CHILI Lab · 2021–2023 · Lead Engineer & Product Manager

The robot that changed jobs

I was hired to add features to a tabletop educational robot and explore a spinout. Discovery with clinicians surfaced something better: stroke-rehabilitation therapy. We pivoted — building a gamified, tangible Pac-Man-like therapy on the robot's haptic and modular capabilities, validated with hospital partners. To get there I led the full rebuild: mechanical drive redesign, new electronics, scalable firmware, ROS integration, a Unity SDK for therapy games, and clinician-facing monitoring UIs. In robotics, discovering the right use case is the product decision.

path accuracy 80% → 98% mechanical cost −60% production cost −30% published IROS 2022

Frontify · 2025–present · Senior PM, Ecosystem & Integrations

From ~100 integrations to one ecosystem

I inherited a hundred-odd integrations, fifteen-plus partners, and no operating model. I built the governance, portfolio structure, and delivery function; redirected Frontify's first e-commerce integration to a synchronization architecture after discovery broke the original concept; and started the ecosystem's first usage-analytics foundation. Also: AI-governance discovery — content credentials (C2PA), provenance, EU AI Act readiness.

≈100 integrations, one model 15+ partner engagements 1st e-commerce integration

Timly · 2023–2025 · First Product Manager

Feature factory → product-led

First PM at a Zurich SaaS startup. I built the product function from zero — discovery cadence, prioritization, Mixpanel/NPS instrumentation, session recordings — and moved the company from shipping features to shipping outcomes. The numbers followed.

ARR & customers 2× YoY, twice NPS 4.0 → 7.2

Fremco · 2018–2019 · R&D Engineer

Robots meet mud

Sensing and data-acquisition systems for fiber-optic installation machinery, tested in the field with the operators who used them. Industrial reality is the best teacher of failure modes — lab prototypes don't get rained on.

embedded sensing → production design field-tested with operators

Two degrees, eight roles, one thread from hardware to product.

BSc Software Engineering education 2009 – 2013

King Juan Carlos University · Madrid, Spain

BSc Industrial Engineering education 2013 – 2017

Carlos III University · Madrid, Spain

Automation focus — chosen for depth over a faster paycheck.

Strategy Analyst Feb – Aug 2016

Accenture Strategy · Madrid, Spain

IoT go-to-market, telecom positioning, and VoD market analysis.

Technology Consultant — Data & Automation 2017 – 2018

EY · Madrid, Spain

Computer-vision initiatives, a humanoid-robot project, and RPA cutting manual ops 40%.

R&D Engineer 2018 – 2019

Fremco · Aalborg, Denmark

Sensing and data-acquisition for fiber-optic installation machinery, field-tested.

MSc Mechatronics & Control Engineering education 2018 – 2020

Aalborg University · Denmark

Thesis: quaternion dynamics, UKF estimation, and nonlinear control for a ball-balancing robot.

Research Assistant — Robotics & Perception Oct – Dec 2020

Aalborg University · Denmark

Path planning, control, and multi-sensor fusion under real-time constraints.

Lead Engineer & Product Manager Feb 2021 – Feb 2023

EPFL — CHILI Lab · Lausanne, Switzerland

Rebuilt a tabletop robot end to end; pivoted it to clinical stroke-rehab therapy. Published at IROS 2022.

Product Manager (first PM) Feb 2023 – Feb 2025

Timly · Zurich, Switzerland

Built the product function from zero. ARR and customers 2× YoY, two years running.

Senior PM, Ecosystem & Integrations Sep 2025 – present

Frontify · Zurich, Switzerland

~100 integrations, one operating model; AI-governance and e-commerce architecture work.

Things I've modeled, built, or published.

MSc thesis · Aalborg · 2020

Control of a Ball-Balancing Robot

Quaternion Lagrangian dynamics for a 5-DOF underactuated MIMO ballbot; unit-norm-preserving unscented Kalman filters; cascade nonlinear feedback-linearization control benchmarked against sliding mode. Honest finding: the simpler EKF won on complexity-vs-benefit.

quaternionsUKFnonlinear controlSimulink

github.com/VBorjaDD/MasterThesis ↗

Publication · IROS 2022

Modulo Cellulo: Modular Versatile Tangible Educational Robots

The peer-reviewed account of the robot platform I led at EPFL — modularity, tangibility, and the engineering that let one small robot serve classrooms and clinics alike.

IROShapticsHRI

paper & open-access PDF ↗

Aalborg incubator 2019 → open source 2026

Wall-painting construction robot

Led business planning and market research for an autonomous painting concept in a startup incubator. Revived in 2026 as wallbot — an open-source cable-driven wall robot with a flat-coverage mode and a high-resolution mural mode.

0→1constructioncable robot

github.com/VBorjaDD/wallbot ↗

MSc portfolio · 2018–2020

Grippers, ultrasound & hydraulics

A low-cost underactuated robotic gripper; ultrasonic fault detection for concrete and metals; modeling and control of a hydraulic press. Project-based learning, Danish style.

mechatronicsNDTcontrol

● Current focus

Building wallbot — a cable-driven wall-painting robot, hardware on the way — and rebuilding the ballbot in simulation to compare classical control against learned policies, while working through the VLA stack. Notes will land here.