K-Scale Labs Shuts Down Amid Fierce Global Price War
Just one year after its founding, humanoid robot startup K-Scale Labs is closing its doors. CEO Ben Bolt told investors in an email that the company has just $400,000 left in operating funds—nowhere near enough to survive in a market that has shifted dramatically in only twelve months.
K-Scale emerged from Y Combinator and raised $4 million in early 2024 at a $50 million valuation, with backing from Fellows Fund, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross. Bolt expected an additional $10–15 million to be an easy raise. It wasn’t.
Acquisition talks with 1X Technologies and The Bot Co. failed; both were interested only in hiring a handful of engineers. On YouTube, Bolt shared the full story of the collapse, pointing to a robotics ecosystem transformed by falling prices and new Chinese competition.
When K-Scale launched, a humanoid robot could cost $90,000. Today, Unitree’s G1 sells in the U.S. for about $20,000, and Songyan Power recently unveiled the world’s first sub-¥10,000 humanoid. Unitree’s blistering pace of iteration even hung on motivational posters in K-Scale’s office.
Say Goodbye
Big Vision, Brutal Economics
Bolt and co-founder Xu Rui (formerly of Xiaomi, ByteDance, Tencent) bet on a strategy of open-source software and affordable hardware. They released their software suite, open-sourced robot models, and began taking pre-orders for a $15,000 humanoid—far below typical U.S. production costs.
More than 100 orders came in, worth over $2 million, and K-Scale built 10 prototypes. But the orders weren’t enough to win investor confidence.
Despite interest from engineers at OpenAI, Nvidia, and Amazon, neither customers nor investors materialized at scale. As funding dried up, core team members began to leave. Bolt eventually announced on Discord that pre-orders would be refunded.
Part of a Broader Wave of Failures
K-Scale is not alone. The “spring” of humanoids and embodied AI is already producing its first casualties:
Aldebaran, once famous for Pepper, entered liquidation after years of financial strain.
Embodied, maker of the children’s robot Moxie, shut down in April 2025.
OneStar, a well-financed embodied AI startup linked to Geely family leadership, disbanded just months after launch.
CloudMinds, once valued at $3 billion, continues to struggle with cash flow, layoffs, and unpaid salaries.
In both the U.S. and China, the bar for survival has skyrocketed. New entrants now require hundreds of millions of dollars to compete, and investors are directing capital toward a smaller pool of emerging leaders.
A financial advisory partner summed up the new reality:
“A company focused on the robot brain needs at least 2 billion yuan to survive. No matter how good the team is, without sufficient capital, they likely won’t make it.”
The humanoid robotics boom is still in its early chapters—but the shakeout has already begun.
