The Brexit barrier this CEO is grateful for

Stephen Bennington is the co-founder and CEO of Q5D, a Bristol-based robotics company aiming to automate one of the last stubbornly manual parts of manufacturing: wiring.

“We’re aimed at trying to automate a part of the manufacturing process that’s still largely done by hand,” he says. “That’s wiring.” It is not, he admits, a market many people think about. But it underpins vast sections of global manufacturing, from cars and washing machines to drones, aircraft and defence systems.

It’s a market Bennington estimates at around $200bn and growing fast. “Everything from washing machines to fighter aircraft to vehicles,” he says.

The chill after the vote

Q5D was founded in 2018, although Bennington says the business “really didn’t start until 2020” after delays securing its first funding during Covid. By then, the UK was already moving through the long aftermath of the Brexit vote. For Bennington, who had previously worked with European companies including Safran, the first impact was not regulatory or logistical. It was emotional and commercial.

“It was kind of gut-wrenching,” he says. “Nothing changed immediately, but the atmosphere did. Suddenly, nobody liked us. You couldn’t get a call from anybody in Germany or France.”

That sentiment bled into the early years of Q5D. As a venture-backed advanced manufacturing business, the company needed investment, partners and access to international markets. But Bennington says Brexit made European engagement harder.

“It was very difficult to get calls from German and French investment houses,” he says. “Our first investor was American. It’s continued to the day, 60 per cent of our investment is American, 30 per cent is UK, and 10 per cent is Japanese. And we still haven’t had a European investor, any from the EU.”

The loss of access to European research funding also mattered. Q5D had explored Horizon grants, which Bennington says can help de-risk and commercialise deep-tech businesses. But that route “got impossible”.

Although Q5D’s current sales are focused on the UK, US and Far East rather than Europe, Bennington says Brexit has shaped the company’s risk calculations from the start. “It was always on our risk register as something that was going to be problematic,” he says.

The biggest issue, he argues, is not simply tariffs or paperwork. It is the loss of easy access to a large, integrated market. “In the past, we were part of this continent with 300 million people and in principle movement was easy and setting up businesses was easy, recruitment was, talent was great and all that went away,” he says. “So we’re now an isolated country and everything is a more complex export.”

Regulation is another critical issue for Q5D. Unlike some business leaders, Bennington does not see regulation itself as the enemy. For a robotics company, EU standards and CE marking create trust and barriers to weaker competitors.

“The EU regulations and the CE marking that we still conform to here is incredibly powerful,” he says. “That’s a burden to us, but it’s also a barrier. So, you know, once we cross that barrier, it’s a protection.”

His concern is duplication. If UK and EU standards diverge, companies may need to satisfy multiple regulatory systems. “The thing that we worry about most is having to do it multiple times in different territories.”

The talent that stayed home

Talent remains another unresolved issue. Q5D is based in Bristol, which Bennington describes as a strong area for engineers, but he believes the company would have had access to a wider talent pool before Brexit. “We definitely would have been able to pick up engineers from across Europe,” he says. “We would have recruited much more widely from a larger pool.”

Asked whether Brexit forced British manufacturers to become more resilient or globally focused, Bennington says Q5D had no choice. “Everything’s an export,” he says. “The UK is a tiny market and there’s just no way we could make a viable business of our scale… on UK sales alone.”

Looking ahead, he wants closer regulatory alignment, improved sentiment with Europe, easier movement for high-value talent and deeper links into European procurement, particularly in defence.

But when asked whether Brexit has been a net positive or negative, his answer is immediate.

“Huge negative,” he says. “I cannot think of anything that’s been of value.”

For Bennington, the most damaging effect is not a single rule change. It is distance. “We can always export and we can find ways around the tariffs and regulation,” he says. “But if they’re not willing to talk to us in the first place, then you just can’t do anything.”

What does this mean for founders?

Treat tough regulation as a moat, not just a cost: Meeting CE standards is a burden but it locks out weaker competitors and once you’re over the bar it protects you.

Put structural risk on the register before it bites: Brexit sat on Q5D’s risk register from the start, shaping decisions rather than ambushing them. Name the macro and political risks explicitly.

The barrier that hurts most is the one you can’t quantify: Tariffs and paperwork have workarounds; a partner who won’t take your call doesn’t. Access and relationships are strategic assets.