It's difficult to know where to focus when speaking to Christoph Kohstall. The contents of his packed Palo Alto garage compete for attention. To his immediate right stands a tower of electrical components, dotted with flashing lights. To his left is a workbench and the tops of machining tools.

A red industrial girder runs along the ceiling above. Anyone who spent even a little bit of time in robotics labs will immediately recognize this element as a gantry system - stabilization for robots during testing.

Indeed, at the far end, only the very tip of a robot head is visible, peering out above Kohstall's shoulder as he logs in to the meeting. I ask if the ceiling-mounted system is being used to run his system's bipedal robot. He nods before revealing that the team has moved on to another, less conventional system: an $80 coat rack.

One thing you can be sure of while peeking into Kind Humanoid's chaotic workspace: The spirit of Silicon Valley's dormant home-brew computing scene may have been priced out of pretty much every available nook and cranny, but it's by no means dead.

Videos by the robotics startup are full of that same magic. Kind's first Mona prototypes seem to be cobbled together Frankensteinesque, like a prop from a teen comedy about two kids building a robot to win the science fair.

It's hard to know what to make of it all at first glance. Kohstall has a Silicon Valley pedigree that would seem to bely the chaotic scene, including, most recently, a year spent working on robotics as part of the now-defunct Google Brain team.

Kind Humanoid's three-person team recently gained a champion in Yves Béhar. The highly sought-after designer says he first visited Kohstall's garage in late 2022/early 2023.

"I was immediately fascinated by two things," he says. "One: To literally see robots emerge out of a small laboratory, to see body parts come out of the 3D printer, and to see motors and actuators and these elements be fitted inside of those parts. The other was a sense of efficiency and speed that I found really exciting."

Last week, Kind revealed Béhar's renderings for a humanoid robot. It's an alien mishmash of angles and shapes that are every bit as playful as the home-brewed robot inside. The robot itself is clad in soft white, with rounded edges to match. Almost as if someone was dared to build a human-shaped figure from a collaborative industrial arm.

The robot's end effectors are unmistakable as a stand-in for human hands. Its feet, however, seem much more hoof-like. Further inspection reveals them as a pair of actuated joints that stabilize the bipedal bot. Up top, a diamond-shaped head is mounted on an impossibly skinny neck. Adding to the render's dreamlike quality, there's a tiny visor-like screen displaying a cloudy blue sky.

It's by design surreal. Béhar has borrowed aesthetic cues from Belgian painter René Magritte.

We use those background images of clouds to start to find ways that we can communicate the robot's intent, or what it's going through at the moment. Is it thinking? Is it reflecting? Is it going to give me an interesting or funny answer? That's why a face is important. The way it orients itself gives you a sense of intent and connection.

The team deliberately avoided having the robot look too human to not get tripped up by the uncanny valley effect. In that sense, there's a marked contrast here from the stark, stormtrooper design employed by the likes of Tesla and Figure. Form, in this case, follows function. Kind envisions Mona as a home caretaker.

Most of the humanoid manufacturers are focusing on the industrial first and will eventually bring this technology into a home setting. There are several reasons why this is the case, most of which boil down to simple economics. Carmakers tend to have deeper pockets than caretakers. Corporations can invest these technologies to help them scale toward mass production.

It's exactly because other humanoid manufacturers aren't tackling the home in the near term that Kind's three-person team is investing its efforts here. "We do not intend to compete in the industrial market, because it is very crowded," Kohstall says. "Ironically, the argument to build a humanoid is not the strongest in the industrial market. The industrial market is pretty well served in many ways by specialized robots.". The humanoid is so beautifully potent in an environment where [there's] diverse locomotion across stairs and cluttered environments.
The first set of customers would include care facilities and elderly home settings that could engage the aging in place. Aging in place is a very untapped market with advanced robotics; most commercial work has been directed to bringing humanoids to warehouse and factory floors.

All this feels, somehow, almost impossibly out of reach. Perhaps it's Kind's lack of interest in fundraising, an act of passivity that's strange in Silicon Valley-land and rent protection.

"Our team is focused on the innovation part," Kohstall says, "and that's just not something you can solve by throwing money at it. It requires experimentation, capital efficiency, and thought.

He states Kind is assembling its first dozen Mona robots, scheduled to be deployed on field tests come early next year. It sounds like a fantasy declaration equal in sort of a Béhar's product design. I nod toward the robot sitting behind Kohstall, pointing out there remains a great deal of daylight between those early DIY frankenbots making appearances in videos and the Magritte-inspired renderings.

He identifies the sinewy robots appearing in frequent promos for Kind's videos as the first prototype. He relocates the conference call outside, where pieces of the robot are being spray-painted on the ground. These form the outer shell of the robot, and move the design more in line with the one Béhar dreamed up.

"Most parts are injection moldable," says Kohstall. "So it can be mass manufactured and built cheaply."