Silas Adekunle used to black out his entire apartment block.
Not on purpose, or at least, not exactly. As a child in Osun State, Nigeria, he conducted ambitious electronics experiments that tripped the power supply and knocked out the lights for every flat in the building. The neighbours complained. His parents didn’t quite know what to make of it.
But he kept going. That refusal to stop building just because something wasn’t working yet is the throughline of everything that came after.
Silas was twelve when his mother, a nurse, brought the family to the UK. A new country, a new school, a new everything. What saved him, he’d later say, was the internet. He treated it as a library with no closing time. By the time he got to the University of the West of England in Bristol, he was studying Robotics and carrying the kind of self-taught depth that formal education rarely accounts for. He graduated with First Class Honours.
The gap nobody was filling
Most people who study robotics come in expecting one thing and find another. The field in the early 2010s was technically impressive and almost completely inaccessible to ordinary people. The robots that existed were industrial, expensive, or purely academic. Nothing spoke to regular consumers. Nothing was fun.
Silas saw that gap during his degree and walked straight into it. In his first year at UWE, he and another student created a programme to take robotics into local schools, expanding it to four Bristol schools over four years. He named it ‘Reach.’
“It symbolises our approach of using robotics to further people’s aspirations,” he explained at the time.
It was that work with young people that showed him what was missing. Robotics needed to be in people’s hands. By 2013, he co-founded ‘Reach Robotics’ to do exactly that.
“We’re a product-driven company,” he said back then. “We want to get our robotics into people’s hands. I wouldn’t say we’re developing new technologies; instead we’re using existing ones in new ways.”
The product he had in mind was a series of robots similar to Pokémon, custom-designed bots that could interact and battle each other, that would evolve and develop over time. “These aren’t standard robotics kits,” he said. “Each robot develops over time and will be different tomorrow to what it is today.”
For a Black founder building hardware in the UK, this was virtually uncharted territory.
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MekaMon
It took years of development, but what eventually came out of Reach Robotics was MekaMon, a four-legged gaming robot that moved with an unsettling fluidity and connected to a smartphone using augmented reality, letting players battle each other across a physical and digital space simultaneously. It had personality. It had character. It was unlike anything commercially available.
“We’ve created an entirely new video gaming platform,” Adekunle said at launch. “MekaMon straddles both the real and virtual worlds while taking the gaming experience beyond a player’s screen and turning their sitting room into a limitless robotic battle zone.”
The first 500 units sold and generated $7.5 million in revenue. London Venture Partners invested. Total funding reached $12 million. The team grew to 65 people.
The Apple deal
The meeting that changed everything wasn’t planned.
Ron Okamoto, Apple’s Head of Developer Relations, walked into a room where MekaMon was being demonstrated. He watched it move. Then he said three words: “It’s got character.” What was supposed to be a brief conversation became an hour. Okamoto brought Silas back to Apple Park in Cupertino. A year of joint development followed.
In 2018, Reach Robotics and Apple signed an exclusive distribution agreement. MekaMon became the first consumer robot ever to be sold in Apple Stores, across the United States and the United Kingdom.
And the end came
In September 2019, Reach Robotics closed.
Consumer hardware is genuinely hard. The margins are thin, the logistics are punishing, and the window between product-market fit and cash crisis can be very narrow. Reach Robotics ran into those realities. So have companies with deeper pockets and longer runways.
Silas didn’t disappear. He didn’t go quiet.
The Africa chapter
He bounced back with ‘Awarri’, the name taken from the Yoruba word àwárí, meaning “seek and find.” The aim was to build AI and robotics infrastructure for Africa, by Africans, trained on African languages and African data. Not an adaptation of something built elsewhere. Something native.
Awarri is developing Nigeria’s first multilingual AI assistant. It runs robotics education programmes for young Nigerians during school holidays. It is, in Silas’ words, about making sure the next generation doesn’t have to leave the continent to get started.
He also co-founded Reach Industries, an AI platform focused on scientific research and laboratory automation.
In 2025, Silas Adekunle was recognised as the world’s highest-paid robotics engineer. He has been named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in both Europe and Africa, the Financial Times Top 100 Minority Ethnic Leaders in Technology, and the Maserati 100.
