K-Scale Labs Cancels K-Bot Orders, Open-Sources All IP After Funding Fails

K-Scale Labs, the Palo Alto startup that aimed to build a low-cost, open-source humanoid robot, is canceling all pre-orders for its K-Bot and refunding customer deposits. The company has laid off most of its team and has "less than a month of runway," according to a letter sent to customers by founder and CEO Benjamin Bolte.

The news, which first circulated on X (formerly Twitter), was confirmed by the letter, in which Bolte detailed the company's failure to secure necessary funding.

"Following our launch, I was hoping to use the demonstrated interest to raise additional funding to finance the required tooling for high-volume production and obtain mass-market regulatory approvals," Bolte wrote. He explained that without this capital to "finance and amortize these costs," the "unit economics for our product do not make sense."

Bolte candidly expressed his surprise at the fundraising failure, contrasting the American and Chinese investment climates. "My view that we would be able to obtain similar funding was predicated on my confidence that American capital markets would be deeper than Chinese capital markets and that there would be ample investor appetite for a cost-competitive American humanoid company," he wrote. "However, while I was able to raise a small amount of capital, I have not been able to find a lead investor."

The development is a sudden and dramatic reversal for the Y Combinator-backed startup. The company had recently begun shipping its first K-Bot Founder's Edition units and just last month demonstrated impressive low-latency teleoperation of its robot.

In a final move aligning with the company's vocal open-source-first philosophy, Bolte announced that K-Scale is releasing all of its proprietary intellectual property.

"We are releasing all of K-Scale's proprietary IP, including the hardware and software for the K-Bot and Zeroth Bot projects, under non-commercial licenses (hardware under CERN-OHL-S-2.0, software under MIT)," the letter stated. Bolte added that he hoped this work would "lay the foundation for future hackers and dreamers."

While Bolte's letter signals an end to active development, conflicting reports have surfaced. Robotics professional "stash" (@stash_pomichter) tweeted that "K-scale has shut down." However, Alysha Lobo (@alysha_lobo), a global operator in the robotics industry, replied, "It hasn’t shut down. There’s some other news baking which I am not at liberty to share."

For now, K-Scale's operations appear to be ceasing. Bolte's letter serves as a candid post-mortem on the immense capital hurdles facing hardware startups, even in the white-hot humanoid robotics sector, and a stark data point in the debate over open-source versus closed-source development models.