Boston Dynamics Lays Off Human Employees, Says It's "Burning Through Cash"

"However, we are also burning through cash at a rate that exceeds our commercial progress to date..."

Bot Profitable

Boston Dynamics, the company behind the popular Spot robot dog, is in financial trouble.

As the Boston Globe reported last week, the company laid off 45 employees, accounting for about five percent of its workforce.

The layoffs "affect nearly every function throughout the business," a spokesperson told the newspaper.

"This decision was not made lightly," Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Player wrote in a note to employees that was candid about the company's business struggles, even after the immense media coverage its robots have garnered.

"Our long-term outlook remains positive: Spot continues scaling steadily with industrial and government customers, Stretch is proving its value with logistics and retail players, and our R&D work on Atlas is progressing at an encouraging pace," he added, referring to the company's three main consumer robot offerings.

"However, we are also burning through cash at a rate that exceeds our commercial progress to date, and we need to streamline our operations and production processes to support sustainable growth," Player wrote. "Today is about making a very difficult short-term decision in service of our longer-term strategy and profitability goals."

Stretch Goal

The company is also facing steadily growing competition, particularly when it comes to humanoid robots. Companies, including Tesla, Agility Robotics, and Figure AI, are all raising huge sums to bring similar robots to market.

It's a surprising development given the popularity of the company's Spot robot. The quadruped has been on sale since 2019, and has since been deployed in a number of settings, from the New York City Fire Department to hospitals during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

More recently, a Spot robot dog was spotted patrolling president-elect Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

Boston Dynamics' Stretch, a tall, robotic arm on wheels, is already making its way into autonomously operated warehouses to move heavy objects and perform other repetitive tasks.

A recently announced and fully electric version of the company's humanoid Atlas robot is also set to go on sale soon, according to an April update.

But given the latest news, Boston Dynamics is struggling to turn all that hype into a viable long-term business — which could be a canary in the coal mine for other companies looking to build sustainable businesses off robotics and AI right now.

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