Co-Founder and CEO at R.I and Founder at Awarri
Country: Nigeria
Sector: Technology
Silas Adekunle is a revolutionary entrepreneur with a degree in robotics. He has constantly made innovations that have attracted international investors. He is the co-founder and former CEO of Reach Robotics, a reality gaming company that creates robots for gaming and for STEM education.
Silas Adekunle: Early Life and Education
Silas Adekunle is a young 26-year old Nigerian who is scaling heights in the technological realm, especially in the field of robotics. This genius was born in Lagos, Nigeria, where he was educated for the better part of his life.
Upon finishing his secondary school education as a teenager, Silas relocated to the UK and went on to study Robotics at the University of West England, Bristol. He graduated with a first-class degree from this prestigious university.
After his graduation, Silas founded a technological company called Reach Robotics. The organization established in 2013 specialized in fusing gaming and augmented reality to perform real-world functions.
Professional Life
Adekunle is the co-founder and former CEO of Reach Robotics, an augmented reality gaming company that creates robots for gaming and for STEM education. The startup has developed a 4 legged robot with a lifelike movement called MekaMon.
The platform brings video game characters to life by combining robotics with augmented reality. Reach Robotics has also developed an app, which controls the MekaMon and acts as a portal to digital content. Adekunle has received $12 million from investors, including London Venture Partners, allowing the UK-based company to expand to 65+ full-time employees at its peak.
In 2018, Adekunle partnered with Apple, signing an exclusive distribution deal to sell his product in both the United States and Britain. Reach Robotics shut down on Sept. 2, 2019 due to “inherent challenges in the consumer robotics sector”.
Adekunle is now focused on using MekaMon to develop the Robotics education ecosystem across Africa and cloud infrastructure for industrial automation in the UK. He founded the company Awarri, which aims to enable the development and adaptation of advanced AI & Robotics technology in Africa. As of January 2020, Adekunle is also the co-founder and CEO of (R.I).
The company aims to help developers to quickly and securely implement the cloud infrastructure needed to remotely monitor, manage and control their robots, industrial automation, and IOT devices.
Silas Adekunle: Creation of Awarri
Having shut down Reach Robotics, Adekunle moved on to focus on using Mekamon to build a robotics education ecosystem across Africa and cloud infrastructure for industrial automation in the UK.
To make this work, he founded Awarri, an education project for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths (STEAM) that is aimed at exposing young people and educators to robotics and coding. It is targeted at the development and adaptation of advanced AI and Robotics technology in Africa.
Adekunle has started supporting the educational system by introducing cheap, affordable technology that is still able to compete on the global scale robotics kits to Africa.
Through Awarri, young people will start to research and think of ways to solve Africa’s problem. And in the near future, Nigeria will have an Awarri lab, Awarri Academic and Mekamon as part of the educational curriculum.
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Honors
In November 2018, Adekunle was named to the Financial Times’ list of the ‘Top 100 minority ethnic leaders in technology.
From a very humble beginning and grueling start, Silas has made quite a name for himself and he is now well recognized by a lot of individuals and bodies around the world. Not only was he acknowledged as someone to watch in 2018 by the Black Hedge Fund Group, he has also been listed in the 2018 Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe: Technology.
Silas Adekunle: Net Worth
Although the net worth of the genius is not known in figures, it has been gathered that Adekunle is now the highest-paid robotics engineer in the world. He has also been described as the smartest robotics engineer. He was able to achieve this milestone achievement after he signed a deal with Apple Inc. The company was awed by the quality of its robots and “their ability to show emotion with subtly-calibrated movements. So, Apple priced his four-legged “battle-bots” at $300 and has put them in nearly all of its stores in the United States and Britain.”
In an interview with Forbes, Silas shared how his passion to make learning more entertaining for kids stirred him to success: “Early customers skew towards male techies but a growing number of parents are buying the robots for their children to get them interested in STEM.” The inventive scientist who presently lives and learns at the Bristol Robotics Lab which is said to be the best robotics research center in the UK said that the secret to his success is balancing, sharing ideas, proper time management, and being himself.
(Sources: Wikipedia, Forbes, Nairametrics, Pulse and Legit.ng)
