How Deep Tech Survives: The Boston Dynamics Story and What It Teaches Us

  Boston Dynamics, the U.S. robotics company behind Atlas, has never achieved sustained profitability since its founding in 1992. Even after Hyundai Motor Group acquired it for approximately $1.1 billion in 2021, the company has accumulated losses exceeding 1.2 trillion KRW over the past four years. If this company were rooted in Korea, it would likely have been labeled a "zombie enterprise" and eliminated within five years. The question is: How does deep tech survive in America?

  Boston Dynamics originated from MIT's "Leg Lab," spun off by Professor Marc Raibert in 1992. In an era when robots were largely confined to science fiction, the company's survival depended almost entirely on government funding—not as one-time grants, but as sustained research contracts from DARPA.

DARPA is widely recognized as the cradle of American hard tech. The agency invests heavily in high-risk, high-failure projects. A 2016 DARPA white paper stated: "If our programs have no failures, that means we are not taking enough risks." The agency has long tolerated failure rates as high as 90%. It was under this philosophy that Boston Dynamics developed BigDog in 2005 and the first Atlas bipedal robot in 2013—without any pressure for immediate commercialization.

  In the 2010s, robotics entered the investment radar of big tech. Google acquired Boston Dynamics in 2013 for $500 million, followed by SoftBank Vision Fund in 2017, and finally Hyundai Motor Group in 2021. Each transition provided a new "capital greenhouse," allowing the technology to mature across three distinct phases: academic seeding, government nurturing, and industrial scaling. Today, Atlas stands on the threshold of mass production.

  The contrast with Korea is stark. In Korea, university spin-offs face immense barriers. Government funding for long-term research without visible成果 is rare. Large corporations acquiring startups remains exceptional: only 3-4% of Korean startups exit through M&A, compared to nearly 90% in the U.S. IPOs are virtually the only viable exit path.

Regulatory hurdles are a key bottleneck. When Korean conglomerates acquire domestic startups, they face stringent affiliate regulations and fiduciary liability risks if performance falters. The resale market for acquired firms is also limited. In such an environment, deep tech startups struggle to take root, let alone survive for decades.

  Korea's recent startup initiatives are welcome steps, but we must not confuse events with ecosystems. World-class deep tech is not built on glossy competitions. It requires patient capital that tolerates failure and institutional frameworks that enable such patience. The Boston Dynamics story is not about a single company—it is about a system that allows tomorrow's technologies to be imagined, funded, and finally realized, even if it takes 34 years.