Speaker Profile

Barney Wragg

Co-Founder & CEO, Karakuri

Barney Wragg is the co-founder and CEO of Karakuri, the leading provider of robotics, AI and automation systems for the $4tn restaurant and food services industry. Barney’s career spans technology, digital media and entertainment - where he has delivered numerous groundbreaking enterprises. He has balanced being an entrepreneur with working on new, pioneering technologies for global giants such as EMI and ARM. Barney’s unique understanding of how groundbreaking technology can delight people is at the core of what Karakuri’s systems aim to achieve.

Before founding Karakuri, Barney was the CEO of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group, and lead the emerging digital divisions of Universal and EMI, introducing new licensing and engagement models with iTunes, YouTube and Spotify. He pioneered EMI’s move to DRM-free and established many of the industry’s current practices for digital marketing, content delivery and brand partnerships.

Barney, who has a BSc degree in Physics and Acoustics, worked at a number of start-ups in the 90s, including the then fledgling ARM where he joined the ‘system on chip’ group and met Karakuri co-founder, Simon Watt. His key contributions at ARM included developing and marketing ARM’s multimedia strategy and deploying low cost, low complexity audio and video compression and decompression solutions on ARM’s low power, RISC processors.