Reach Robotics put MekaMon inside Apple Stores before shutting down in 2019. Seven years later, Adekunle is building AI for science in Britain and language technology in Nigeria.
Silas Adekunle had already done the part most hardware founders never reach.
His company had built a physical product, sold its first production run, raised venture capital and secured retail distribution through Apple.
Then Reach Robotics shut down.
The Bristol company closed in September 2019 after six years building MekaMon, a four-legged robot that combined physical movement with augmented-reality gaming.
Adekunle described consumer robotics at the time as an “inherently challenging space”, while later accounts pointed to high hardware costs and difficulty securing enough investment to keep the company going.
Adekunle did not try to rebuild the same company.
His work since then has split in two directions. In Britain, Reach Industries is selling artificial intelligence to science laboratories. In Nigeria, Awarri is working on AI infrastructure, local-language models and technology training.
The common thread is no longer consumer robotics. It is the technical infrastructure underneath machines that can see, interpret and act on information.
MekaMon got further than most hardware startups
Adekunle started Reach Robotics while studying robotics at the University of the West of England in Bristol.
He graduated with first-class honours and had previously worked at GE Aviation and Infineon Technologies. The university later awarded him an honorary doctorate for his work in technology and entrepreneurship.
Reach Robotics was incorporated in 2013.
Its first commercial product, MekaMon, looked like a small four-legged battle robot. A smartphone controlled the machine and provided the augmented-reality layer, allowing players to fight virtual opponents or other MekaMon robots.
The company produced an initial run of 500 units and sold them.
In July 2017, Reach Robotics raised a $7.5 million Series A led by Korea Investment Partners and IGlobe. The money was intended to hire staff, market the product and expand beyond Britain.
Four months later, MekaMon went on sale through Apple.
Apple stocked the $300 robot online and in stores in the United States and Britain. TechCrunch reported at the time that Apple had been following the product as it pushed further into augmented reality through its own devices and software.
For a young Nigerian-born engineer building consumer hardware in Bristol, Apple gave Reach something difficult to buy: distribution and credibility.
It did not solve the economics.
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Reach Robotics closed two years after the Apple deal
Hardware companies carry costs that software startups can often postpone.
Products have to be manufactured before they are sold. Components have to be sourced. Inventory has to be stored. Defective units have to be replaced. Shipping, certification and retail margins all take cash.
Reach Robotics also had to convince consumers that MekaMon was more than an expensive toy.
By 2019, the company was under financial pressure. Corporate filings show activity around creditor security shortly before the closure, while contemporary reporting said Reach had been looking for fresh investment or a buyer.
On September 3, Adekunle announced that the business was closing.
He did not claim that Apple had failed the company or that the technology had stopped working. His explanation was narrower: consumer robotics was difficult, particularly for a startup.
MekaMon had reached the market. Reach Robotics had failed to turn that achievement into a durable company.
The distinction becomes important when looking at what Adekunle built next.
Reach industries went after laboratories
Adekunle started Reach Industries with Chris Beck, who had also worked with him at Reach Robotics.
The new company moved away from entertainment.
Its main product, Lumi, uses cameras, computer vision and machine learning to record what happens inside scientific laboratories. The system can capture experimental activity, document procedures and analyse laboratory work without scientists entering every observation manually.
The customer is no longer someone buying a robot for their living room.
Reach Industries sells into life sciences, where laboratories handle experiments that have to be documented accurately and reproduced.
The Times reported in 2026 that Lumi had been piloted with Pfizer and was being used by companies working in medicine and toxicology. Reach Industries had grown to 25 employees, expanded into London and Boston and reached seven-figure annual turnover, according to the newspaper.
The business still uses technologies familiar from MekaMon. Computer vision, sensors and machine intelligence remain central.
The commercial setting has changed.
A consumer deciding whether to spend hundreds of dollars on a gaming robot is making a discretionary purchase. A pharmaceutical or biotechnology company buying software that reduces manual laboratory work is solving an operating problem.
Adekunle moved from one customer to the other.
Nigeria became the other half of his work
Awarri began in 2019, the same year Reach Robotics closed.
Adekunle has said he was spending more time in Nigeria before the shutdown and had begun looking at gaps in robotics education and technical infrastructure. Reach Robotics’ assets were later acquired by Awarri for educational use.
The company initially concentrated on robotics training. Its work has since moved deeper into artificial intelligence.
In September 2025, Nigeria’s Ministry of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy launched N-ATLAS, an open-source multilingual language model developed by Awarri in partnership with the federal government.
The model was built to work with Nigerian languages that have received far less representation in mainstream AI systems.
Awarri has also built language-data collection programmes and worked with Nigeria’s 3 Million Technical Talent programme. The company says it has trained and engaged thousands of data operators and engineers in its AI work.
Adekunle now runs companies on both sides of the Africa-Europe technology relationship. Reach Industries is selling AI into scientific organisations in developed markets.
Awarri is trying to build some of the data, models and technical capacity required for AI products developed around African languages and users.ca.
The Apple deal was not the end of the story
The old version of Adekunle’s career is easy to package.
A Nigerian boy becomes a robotics engineer, invents a gaming robot and lands a deal with Apple. It is also incomplete.
Reach Robotics closed less than two years after MekaMon entered Apple Stores. The deal that made Adekunle famous did not make the company sustainable.
What followed is more useful for understanding him as a builder. He stayed with robotics and artificial intelligence but changed the markets he was building for.
Reach Industries took technology developed around machines that could see and respond to their surroundings and put it inside laboratories. Awarri took his interest in robotics back into Nigeria and eventually into language models and AI infrastructure.
