Chris Thomas

Previously founding design engineer at k-scale labs (YC W24). Built the first ecosystem of open source humanoid robots — with 200+ units pre-ordered for $2M+ to developers and research labs worldwide.

Now at the intersection of mechanical design and physical intelligence, I'm building hardware for robots to comfortably exist amongst us.

Cool things I’ve done:

  • I conceived the K-Bot as a skunkworks project over winter break. Became the first open-source humanoid to deploy RL walking and VLA manipulation, sketch to production in under 4 months.
  • The Z-Bot, a compact consumer humanoid platform for learning RL control. Designed across two major iterations, stress-tested through hackathons and deployed at Stanford's CS234. 20k+ waitlist, launched at CES.
  • Co-founded and built hardware for several open-source robotics projects, notably the Zeroth Bot, LeLamp, and something new releasing soon.
  • So far I’ve built 4 humanoids and 3 unique form-factors. I find elegant solutions within conflicting constraints, design across disciplines, and validate through rapid prototypes.

Beyond just hardware

  • Worked on closing the sim2real gap at both the hardware level (actuators, structural design) and software level (URDF setup, training environments, sim model debugging).
  • Implemented the world model VJEPA-2 AC on the OpenArms in a 24 hr hackathon. Led RT inference deployment and won 1st place at the hackathon.
  • Built a synthetic data generation pipeline for fine-tuning VLM/VLAs. Fully parameterized scenes and object generation to create scalable datasets.
  • Built a pipeline for extracting mocap data from egocentric video and retargeting to robot embodiments to train whole body control policies with AMP.
  • Hosted 3 technical hackathons and 2 events, some crossing 1000 attendees.

What I’ve been up to:

13 May '26: Celebrating my birthday at the Hugging Face HQ.

5 May '26: Won 1st at the GOSIM Paris Hackathon after we implemented VJEPA-2 AC on the OpenArm platform within a day.

28 Apr '26: Demo day at FR8 — built the integration of machine agents into legacy industrial factories to automate and improve the quality and uptime of manufacturing.

10 Apr '26: Finished all the classes for my bachelors degree.

9 Nov '25: Hosted the Boxbots Hackathon at UWaterloo with 100+ attendees working on the Lelamp — a robotics dev platform I built with Human Computer Lab.

5 Nov '25: Built Lelamp, a robot lamp as a dev platform to explore human-robot interaction.