Yeah, Kotlin looks largely like a simpler, stripped down version of Scala. It's a lot closer to Scala than it is to Java, but it's close enough to Java devs to not have to put in much effort to learn vs learning Scala. I prefer Scala, but not everyone wants to invest the time to learn it in order to gain maybe 25% more expressiveness. Kotlin also seems like a better fit for Android than Scala (and Java for that matter).

In what sense is it closer to Scala? It's more like a slightly nicer Java: All Kotlin code can be translated back to Java (with some boilerplate), but almost no Scala code could be expressed gracefully in Kotlin (or Java).

Not everything in Scala can be cleanly translated into Java, but Kotlin looks more like a subset of Scala than it does a superset of Java. The syntax is very close.