About
Benjamin Bolte is a bold AI and robotics innovator, best known as the founder and former CEO of K-Scale Labs, a Y Combinator-backed startup that pioneered affordable, open-source humanoid robots like the K-Bot and Z-Bot to democratize embodied intelligence and accelerate humanity toward a Type I civilization on the Kardashev scale. A Mathematics and Computer Science graduate from Emory University with early research in computational neuroscience, Bolte honed his expertise at Tesla—where he authored CUDA kernels for the voxel occupancy network later adapted for Optimus—and at Meta AI, contributing to robotics foundation models, speech systems, and semantic mapping. Driven by a belief in open-source collaboration over proprietary silos, he launched K-Scale in 2024 from a Palo Alto garage, rapidly building a developer community and shipping initial units before the company ceased operations in late 2025 due to funding challenges; in a final act of principle, Bolte released all hardware and software IP to the public, ensuring his visionary work continues to inspire the next generation of general-purpose robotics.