Osh Agabi grew up in Lagos and studied physics at the University of Lagos. He left to program robots in Zurich, then studied computational neuroscience at Umeå University and went on to doctoral research at ETH Zürich and Imperial College London. Along the way, he became, in his words, the first person to apply liquid state machines to living neurons on a chip. That work became the foundation of Koniku, which builds what he calls biological processing units. He walks us through how the Konikore uses living neurons to smell, why silicon can’t, how you keep brain cells alive outside the body, and where the technology is headed. We also get into his bigger argument: that Africa will keep playing catch-up until it builds foundational technologies of its own.
Oshiorenoya “Osh” Agabi is the founder and CEO of Koniku, a Silicon Valley company that builds biological processing units, chips that use living neurons to process information. Its first product, the Konikore, uses neurons to smell, with applications in security, health and food. Born in Lagos, he earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Lagos and a master’s in physics from Umeå University in Sweden, then pursued doctoral research at ETH Zürich and Imperial College London before leaving to build Koniku. He unveiled the Konikore at TEDGlobal 2017 in Tanzania, and Koniku has since worked with partners including Airbus.
