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.