K-Scale is building a sub-$1,000 humanoid research robot

POSTED 06/18/2025  | By: Brian Heater, Managing Editor A3

Study robots are no longer, veritably talking, expansive cash makers. Even so, they can play a key intention in a firm’s fortunes. Through the years, corporations ranging from iRobot to Willow Storage hold come to acknowledge that building systems for laboratory settings is a expansive formulation to bag the following technology of roboticists familiar with their product sooner than commencement.

It’s a beautiful expansive recruiting instrument, and one I live up for an increasing selection of corporations will in all probability be exploring over the following couple of years. The reemergence of this trend will additionally be fueled by latest milestones in the start hardware motion, together with Hugging Face’s 2024 Le Robot platform launch and its subsequent acquisition of Pollen Robotics.

The chronicle of Bay Space-based mostly Okay-Scale Labs matches someplace in the intersection of every subject matters. The Y Combinator-backed company is mild early stages, fueled by an April 2024 pre-seed raise.

The startup notes on its place,

We’re building a robotics stack that helps you to deploy physical AI in the accurate world. Our instrument, hardware, and machine learning stack is seamlessly integrated, permitting you to form out building capabilities in preference to installing packages.

In a put up final yer, YC described Okay-Scale’s then-fresh product as, “a 4-foot humanoid robot named Stompy, full with a claw gripper and designed for easy assembly on a 256×256 3D printer bed.” A shrimp bit over a year later, the firm’s place now shows a trio of systems: Okay-Bot, M-Bot, and Z-Bot. There’s a wide spectrum of mark facets right here, even though the four-foot Okay-Bot is essentially the costliest of the three, for the time being topping out at $9,000, per the checklist.

To my mind, alternatively, it’s the 1.5-foot Z-Bot that affords essentially the most compelling chronicle of the three, with a mark point that squeezing in at moral below $1,000 (precisely $1 below, for the anecdote).  Okay-Scale hopes to form a platform with which builders can take part in building out reinforcement learning, digital twin building, and other frameworks key to bringing humanoids into the office.

In a LinkedIn put up Wednesday, CEO Benjamin Bolte says the Texas-constructed systems are “launching soon.”