Lucas Roitman, the talented tech entrepreneur who sold his drone start-up to Apple

Over the past decade, technology has completely evolved and has left a positive impact on businesses across the world. Some advancement in technology includes business solutions, as well as consumer products that provide entertainment.

Though keeping up with the changing technology can be hard, there are some individuals who find it easy to adapt to it. One of those people is Lucas Roitman, an entrepreneur and inventor who has had a major impact in the technology and engineering field.

Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Lucas grew up with a love for tech development. From a young age, he realized he had an interest in experimenting with video games. So out of curiosity, he started working with real-time video from webcams, visual effects, and 3D materials in video games. While kids his age were busy playing, he created a video game at the age of 11, and later, at 14, an augmented reality product, which he called Airhand.

“I made ‘Airhand’ when augmented reality technology was just starting out,” shares Lucas. “It allowed the user to control the computer with their hand movements. So all you needed to do was look at the screen, point to the object you wanted to get, grab it and open your hand to drop it,” he adds.

This project caught the eye of several major Argentinian newspapers and was presented at Conexa Fest in Buenos Aires, one of the largest interactive arts and technology exhibitions. It was here where he successfully sold it to an international media company, which turned him into one of the youngest self-made millionaires in the world. “After this start-up acquisition, I started experimenting with a wide range of projects, some of which were focused on virtual and augmented reality, and ended up working directly with Palmer Luckey, the original founder of Oculus/Meta Quest,” says Roitman.

He also participated in the National Informatics Olympic team and competed internationally twice, in Thailand and Italy, at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI).

His talent was soon recognized by Stanford University, and he moved to the United States with a merit-based scholarship. About the admission process, he says: “Grades and awards were not what the university cared about the most during the admission process. Professors were actually interested in my achievements and the fact that I was doing it out of genuine interest and not just for public recognition.”

During his time in Silicon Valley, he was part of a highly select 15-people team of Artificial Intelligence researchers and entrepreneurs (15 out of 20,000 Stanford-affiliated candidates). This group is extremely selective and only members with outstanding achievement can be part of it. It included names such as Andrej Karpathy and Feifei Li, both extremely famous researchers in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Lucas was also part of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, under the well known roboticist and researcher Sebastian Thrun, where he worked in a computer vision research project, which eventually turned into a start-up called Lighthouse, a top-notch home security camera which was finally sold to Apple.

Lucas then co-founded Adia Robotics, a groundbreaking start-up that works on drone AI. While being a Stanford student, he was selected to attend the “Stanford in Beijing University” international program for cultural enrichment. Some time later, his startup was chosen to get investment by HAX, the largest hardware incubator in the world, which has an acceptance rate lower than 0.1%. Adia did not only receive funding from this incubator, but also from SOSV Venture Capital. Moreover, during his undergraduate studies, Roitman received several employment offers from firms such as Google, Meta, and Apple, which he rejected due to his work on the start-up.

After Lucas graduated, his drone start-up was also acquired by Apple for an estimated 55 million dollars, and this dynamic entrepreneur joined the team as a senior AI scientist in research and development. Ever since, Lucas has kept soaring in the world of technology. When asked why he became an entrepreneur instead of working for all the spectacular firms that approached him, Lucas explained that he had wanted a business of his own ever since he was a child. He knew he could turn anything he touched into gold, whether it was entertainment, technology, or general business.

“The more I got into technology, the more I realized there was a huge market to be explored,” he shared further. “So, I continued learning, and focusing specifically on understanding different techniques and technologies that could then be useful when making businesses,” Lucas says.

Lucas’s contributions have had a major impact in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, as well as Robotics and Computer Vision. However, he claims that since technology is constantly evolving, it has enormous power to stand as a tool for change. “Nowadays, technology can improve your life by ten to a hundred times, if used appropriately,” he says.

Inspired by Lucas’s journey? Well, he has some advice for you, “It’s never too late to switch career paths: start studying the basics of AI, and enroll in online courses.” In this changing world, it is better to keep up with the times than to be left behind.