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Posted: Thu 23rd Jul 2026
9 min read
When Suleymaan Khan walked into his apprenticeship interview at 15, he didn't arrive empty-handed.
While other candidates brought CVs and qualifications, the Birmingham teenager brought something more persuasive – a fully functioning robot he'd designed and built himself.
"That's what made me stand out," Suleymaan says, now 17 and halfway through a robotics engineering apprenticeship at FANUC UK, the world-leading Japanese robotics manufacturer. "Everyone else was talking about what they could do. I showed them."
Since the age of five, when he first fashioned rudimentary robots from cardboard and string, he's been obsessively building, learning, and creating. At 13, he beat university students to win a national award at the Big Bang Fair with a humanoid robot.
Now, alongside his full-time apprenticeship, he's running , selling affordable robotic hand kits designed to bring engineering to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
"Schools don't really push entrepreneurship," Suleymaan reflects. "A lot of people see the nine-to-five as the expected path, and there's nothing wrong with that.
"But when you tell people you're starting a business, they're like, 'That's not going to work out.' I think young people should know there are different routes, and that it's possible to explore their own ideas too."
"It all came from passion. I taught myself through YouTube, social media, reading different books – just through curiosity," he says.
His father, Yasir, remembers the moment he realised his son was different:
"I went to parents' evening when Suleymaan was about five or six.
"The teacher showed me what he'd made in art class – this 3D model of a boat. I couldn't believe it. She said, 'He's only five. There's something there.'"
Yasir began documenting his son's creations, initially as a way to preserve memories for the future.
"I thought, one day, when he has his own kids, he can show them what he did," he says.
But as the projects grew more sophisticated, so did the ambitions. By the age of 10, Suleymaan had his own YouTube channel. Yasir began entering him into competitions – anything to nurture the obsession.
"As soon as he came back from school, he'd be straight up to his bedroom making things," Yasir says. "He didn't go out with his mates. I didn't have to motivate him. That's all he wanted to do."
But school was a struggle. "I really struggled with sitting in a classroom," Suleymaan admits. "I'm not academically switched on. I barely passed all my exams."
Getting through GCSEs was, his father admits, "such a battle" – but a necessary one.
"I said to Suleymaan, please just get your GCSEs, because if you do, that's going to completely change your direction," Yasir explains.
Though he'd attended university himself and would have loved his son to follow the traditional route, he recognised that a different path was needed. "He's so creative with his hands. He wants to be making things."
The apprenticeship route proved perfect. Suleymaan applied widely and was offered several apprenticeship places.
However, he chose FANUC for the simple reason that it was pure robotics. Now, as a maintenance technician apprentice, he travels across the UK programming industrial robot arms, troubleshooting problems, and learning from colleagues on a range of industrial automation projects.
His side hustle is SuleyNova Robotics, a robotic hand that can be assembled and programmed at home.
"I designed the very first version about a year ago," Suleymaan explains. "But I wanted to teach people robotics through my business, so I redesigned it completely."
The current model is a snap-together 3D-printed kit, pre-loaded code, video and written instructions accessed via QR code, and all the electronics included, priced at £79.99.
"I want to make engineering accessible to people from deprived backgrounds," he says. "My whole business model is to get people into engineering for cheap."
Suleymaan manufactures everything from his bedroom in South Yardley, using a 3D printer (his second – the first was a 13th birthday present, now retired) and components sourced from China.
With £1,000 in grants from ChangeMAKER and Epic Futures – and mentoring support from the latter – he's launched the kits commercially, already notching up sales and interest from the USA, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Australia.
"I'm looking at international shipping now," he says. Future plans include add-on kits for voice control, glove control, and vision-based systems, plus designing custom PCBs (printed circuit boards) to make the electronics cleaner and more premium.
But the longer-term vision is more ambitious still:
"In the future, I want to get into prosthetics. I think they're very expensive for what they are."
The accolades are stacking up. Suleymaan was named Young STEAM Personality of the Year at the Inspirational Youth Awards 2026, reached the semi-finals of the Peter Jones Foundation National Entrepreneur of the Year, and has been shortlisted for Engineering Apprentice of the Year and Innovation of the Year at the Engineering Talent Awards 2026.
He won a Network Rail Innovation Award at the Big Bang Fair in 2023.
His employer, FANUC, has taken notice, too.
"They've started to support me. The managing director includes me in his monthly video updates. They've been really good about my achievements," Suleymaan says.
He's even applied for Dragons' Den – though he's wary of giving away equity too soon:
"I think we're too early stage to give away a percentage of my business. But I do want to look at investment eventually."
For now, Suleymaan is hedging his bets, building SuleyNova while completing his apprenticeship.
In two years, when the Level 3 qualification is completed, he'll face a choice: stay at FANUC, pursue his dream job at Boston Dynamics in America (the company behind backflipping humanoid robots), or go all-in on his own business.
"Preferably, I'd want to go full-time with my business," he says.
“If someone can do it, you can do it. It's all about belief.
"If you tell yourself you can actually do it, you genuinely can. People told me, 'You must be some genius.' But no – I barely passed my exams. It's passion and hard work."
He acknowledges the mental shift required.
"School can sometimes make one route feel like the only route," he says. "But there are lots of ways to build a future — university, apprenticeships, employment, or starting something of your own.
"It can feel uncertain at first, and you might not make anything for a while, but if you keep learning and stay committed, you can create opportunities over time."
Yasir agrees:
"The UK education system is still the best in the world. It's free. You've got massive opportunity. So do something – work, do an apprenticeship – but don't do nothing, because it's going to affect the whole of the rest of your life."
"If you really, really, really want it, you'll find a way to make it work”, Suleymaan says.
