6 lessons I learned watching a robotics startup die from the inside

Every robotics pitch deck has one. “We’re doing for robots what Tesla did for EVs.” “This is the iPhone moment for embodied AI.” At our company, the favorite was the hoverboard (平衡车). Humanoid robots would follow the same cost curve as self-balancing scooters: expensive novelty → Shenzhen mass production → commodity hardware → everywhere.

A hoverboard motor just needs to spin. That’s it. A humanoid robot’s actuators need to be extraordinarily precise, explosively powerful, resistant to wear, and consistent unit to unit. One actuator slightly out of spec and the robot walks wrong, or falls. Hoverboards, smartphones, whatever analogy you pick, none of them tell you anything useful about building a humanoid. The Robot Report

6 lessons I learned watching a robotics startup die from the inside

By Rui Xu |

The K-Bot open-source humanoid robots. | Credit: K-Scale Labs

Editor’s Note: Rui Xu is the former chief operating officer of K-Scale Labs, a San Francisco-based startup that tried to build low-cost humanoid robots. The company shut down in late 2025 and recently open-sourced its intellectual property. Xu first published this article on LinkedIn. It was reprinted with his permission.

I spent a year as COO of a YC-backed robotics startup trying to build affordable humanoid robots. I was forty, had 15 years of hardware experience shipping products at Intel, Xiaomi, Lenovo, Amazon and ByteDance, and joined to run supply chain and product operations. Home

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