Ocado's board is testing a founder handoff after 26 years under Tim Steiner

Why it matters

Ocado is not just considering a CEO change. It is testing whether a founder-built robotics company now needs an enterprise platform operator to sell a more flexible version of its technology.

Tim Steiner's 26-year run as Ocado Group's founding chief executive may be nearing a handoff, with Sky News reporting Sunday that the board is preparing to appoint a successor and has sounded out Vonage CEO Niklas Heuveldop.

The report, relayed by Reuters, is not the same thing as an appointment. Reuters said it could not verify Sky's account. Sky reported that it was unclear Sunday evening how imminent any announcement might be, and whether Heuveldop remained in contention for the role.

That caveat matters because the board is not merely replacing a hired operator. Steiner is the company-builder who turned Ocado from a UK online grocery bet into one of Britain's most closely watched retail technology stories. Ocado's own board profile says Steiner established Ocado in 2000 with two former Goldman Sachs colleagues and has been an executive director since April 13, 2000. Before Ocado, he worked as a bond trader at Goldman Sachs in London, New York and Hong Kong.

Ocado's founding thesis was that grocery could move online if the logistics problem was rebuilt from the warehouse out. The company says it was founded in 2000 to change UK grocery shopping, began pilot deliveries the next year and opened its first automated customer fulfilment centre in Hatfield in 2002. By 2005, Ocado says off-the-shelf systems were no longer enough, pushing the company to develop proprietary software that later became the Ocado Smart Platform.

Why Heuveldop fits the moment

Heuveldop would be a telling choice because his background is not grocery retail. He is a platform and enterprise technology executive. Vonage lists him as chief executive of Vonage, part of Ericsson, and senior vice president and head of Business Area Global Communications Platform at Ericsson, appointed February 1, 2024.

Ericsson bought Vonage in a deal announced in 2021, betting that the cloud communications company could help carriers expose network capabilities through APIs. Vonage describes itself as a foundation of Ericsson's strategy to help network operators use programmable networks. Before taking over Vonage, Heuveldop led Ericsson's North America market area, serving customers in the United States and Canada, according to Vonage's profile of him.

That is the strategic subtext of the reported approach. Ocado is already a grocery company with a founder who understands the operational pain of selling lettuce, chilled fish and weekly baskets online. What the board appears to be testing is whether the next phase needs a CEO who can sell a complex technology platform to large enterprise customers, manage partner economics, and turn years of R&D into repeatable commercial deals.

The founder's problem has changed

The old Ocado story was warehouse robotics at scale. The current one is whether those systems can be sold flexibly enough for a grocery market that no longer wants every online order to run through a huge, centralized robot warehouse.

Ocado has been moving in that direction under Steiner. In its 2025 full-year results, Ocado reported 1.36 billion pounds of group revenue, up 12.1%, and 178 million pounds of adjusted EBITDA, up from 112 million pounds in FY24. But the same results also laid out a reset: Kroger and Sobeys closures, lower structural costs, fewer exclusivity constraints, store-based automation, same-day delivery, short lead-time orders and a push to make partner support more like a professional services business.

The cost side is part of the succession backdrop. In February, Sky News reported that Ocado would cut around 1,000 jobs as part of a restructuring plan, with the company targeting 150 million pounds of savings and cutting research and development spending after years of investment. Ocado's FY25 filing said the company expected actions across technology and support to reduce total cash costs by around 150 million pounds in FY27 relative to FY25.

The partner side is just as important. Ocado said in its FY25 materials that Kroger closed customer fulfilment centres in Frederick, Maryland; Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin; and Groveland, Florida in January 2026, while Sobeys closed a Calgary site after reassessing demand in Alberta. Ocado said the remaining Kroger network had five live CFCs, with another expected in Phoenix, and that Sobeys would keep serving Ontario and Quebec through Toronto and Montreal.

That is the hard edge in the story. Ocado's technology can be operationally strong and still face a commercial market that wants less capital intensity, faster deployment and more optionality. A founder who built the original model is now trying to prove the model can be unbundled.

Asda shows the new pitch

The clearest recent proof of that shift came three weeks before the CEO-succession report. On May 29, Ocado and Asda announced a UK e-commerce partnership built around software and store-linked fulfilment rather than a new mega-warehouse headline.

Under that agreement, Ocado's technology is expected to roll out across Asda stores and dark stores from 2027. Ocado said Asda would use Ocado's front-end webshop, in-store fulfilment and last-mile planning software. The companies said Asda would also use the platform for orders placed through third-party delivery aggregators.

That is exactly the kind of sale Ocado needs more of: less dependent on a single giant warehouse build, more connected to a retailer's existing store network, and closer to the software economics investors have long wanted to see from the company. It also gives context to why a Vonage and Ericsson executive would make sense as a candidate. Heuveldop's job has been to turn a major acquisition into a global communications platform inside a larger industrial technology group. Ocado's board needs someone who can make a robotics and grocery infrastructure stack easier for big retailers to buy, deploy and expand.

What is not established

No start date, transition plan or final candidate has been confirmed. Sky News said Adam Warby, who chairs Ocado, was leading the search. Sky News also reported that Ocado's Friday close of 180.8p gave the company a market capitalization of about 1.5 billion pounds, and that Ocado had lost roughly 90% of its value since a September 2020 peak close of 29.14 pounds.

Those numbers explain why a founder succession process would be surfacing now rather than after a cleaner victory lap. Steiner has spent a quarter-century turning Ocado into a symbol of what British engineering can do in grocery logistics. The next CEO, if Ocado's board follows through, will inherit a different mandate: prove that the technology platform can grow beyond the warehouse strategy that made the founder famous.