Silas Adekunle is a standout Nigerian-British robotics engineer and entrepreneur whose achievements have drawn global headlines. At age 26 he became the World's Highest Paid Robotics Engineer in 2018. Born around July 1991 in Ibadan, Oyo State, he moved to the UK at age 12, earned a First-Class degree in Robotics from the University of the West of England (UWE) Bristol, and later received an honorary Doctor of Technology degree.
At 24 in 2016 he built the world's first intelligent gaming robot, Mekamon, and sold 500 units that same year; the robot - controlled via smartphone app for mixed physical-digital arena battles and STEM education - appeared in Apple stores in the US and UK (around $300) with coverage in Forbes, TechCrunch and CNBC. He was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe (Technology) 2018 and the Financial Times' Top 100 minority ethnic leaders in technology.
His company Reach Robotics raised $12-15 million in venture funding and secured an exclusive Apple retail distribution deal. He also founded Awarri, which builds multilingual LLMs (including Nigeria's first government-backed open-source multilingual LLM N-ATLAS), African-context data infrastructure and education programs. Today he leads Reach Industries, whose flagship product Lumi is a visual AI/copilot platform for laboratory workflows.
