Michael Sikorsky is co-founder and former chief executive of Robots & Pencils, an AI development, implementation and consulting firm that he and his wife, Camille, started in Calgary, Alberta, in 2009 as an iPhone app studio. Born in Alberta in 1972 and originally from Edmonton, he is a computer engineer and serial founder who now runs Copia Wealth Studios, a wealth software company in San Diego, California. He remains Robots & Pencils’ emeritus CEO.
A First Computer Bought with Fast-Food Wages
He told the interviewer Sramana Mitra that he saved money from fast-food jobs to buy his first computer at about 11 or 12 and taught himself to program. By 17 he was writing software and sharing it with other programmers, who sent back advice on making it faster. He studied computer engineering at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, graduating in 1995, because it covered both hardware and software (Sramana Mitra). He found he preferred software and left his first job after engineering school within five months.
Servidium, Cambrian House and an iPhone in New York
He sold his first company, Servidium, at 28; ThoughtWorks acquired it. He then co-founded Cambrian House, a crowdsourcing company that later became Chaordix. In 2007 he stood in line in New York for the first iPhone. “The first time I played with it, I was mesmerized. I knew I wanted to make apps,” he told The Globe and Mail.
Robots and Pencils in a Calgary Basement
He went back to Calgary and set up the company with no investors in his basement with Camille, a graphic designer who later served as its president. The robots were the programmers and the pencils were the designers. “I’m a programmer and my wife is an artist, so we were the perfect prototype for Robots & Pencils,” he told the Calgary Herald in 2012, when the studio’s Spy vs. Spy game was No. 1 in the App Store.
Deloitte later ranked it the fastest-growing company in Alberta and 34th in North America, and he converted Calgary’s old Oddfellows Hall into its headquarters. In 2017 Robots & Pencils merged with Kinetiq Digital of Cleveland, Ohio, which became its headquarters, and in 2018 Slack acquired Missions, a venture the company had built. By then he had moved to San Diego.
Copia Wealth Studios in San Diego
He founded Copia Wealth Studios in 2021 and is its chief executive. The company builds AI software for wealthy families, family offices and registered investment advisers, and in March 2025 launched Clarity, an AI wealth platform. “Imagine you have a wealth operating system that knows everything about you and someone says something, you could say, ‘do I need to care?’ And it says, ‘no,’ and you go to sleep with a lot of peace,” he told the San Diego Business Journal. Len Pagon Jr. now leads Robots & Pencils as chief executive.