Foundry Robotics raised $100 million to build autonomous factories, along with robots
Rethinking factories from scratch, with robotics
Adarsh Kulkarni, CEO of Foundry Robotics, has a clear thesis: the only way to revive American manufacturing is to rethink it from scratch. "Factories reviving U.S. manufacturing must be fundamentally rethought rather than retrofitting existing operations," he said.
His company just raised $100 million to prove that out.
What Foundry actually builds
Foundry operates on a manufacturing-as-a-service model. Customers do not buy robots but contract production while Foundry handles everything: the robotic cells, the AI, the operations.
The pitch is that a company can go "from design to production within weeks" without building or managing its own production line.
The core technology is FoundryOS: a single agentic platform linking robots, factory floor operations, and cloud infrastructure. AI models trained on assembly fundamentals get deployed across a grid of reconfigurable robotic cells, and each production cycle feeds data back into the models.
The system learns from what it runs.
The product mix is deliberately varied: drones, autonomous vehicle subassemblies, wire harnesses, satellites, underwater vehicles, ground robots, and data center equipment. That's intentional: a platform that works across categories is an operating system for American manufacturing.
The team behind it
Kulkarni holds a robotics master's from UPenn's GRASP robotics lab, one of the top robotics research programs in the country. Co-founder Emmanuel Lamacchia was a program manager on the Tesla Model Y. The rest of the core team includes a former Tesla software leader and veterans from Raytheon and Northrop Grumman.
The Series A was oversubscribed.
Lead investor Marlinspike Partners was joined by Khosla Ventures, Red Glass Ventures, SE Ventures, Wing VC, Axiom Ventures, Hanabi, and Zero Shot Fund. Foundry will use the capital to expand its 130,000-square-foot Emeryville facility, accelerate AI model deployment, and grow both its engineering and factory operations teams.
The defense angle
One of Foundry's named customers is HII Unmanned Systems.
"Foundry's autonomous assembly approach addresses the defense industrial base's critical capacity need," says Duane Fotheringham from HII.
The US defense industrial base has a real problem: the military needs more drones, more autonomous vehicles, more sophisticated hardware, and it needs it all faster than traditional manufacturers can produce it. (And cheaper.)
A factory that can reconfigure itself to produce different types of autonomous systems on demand is exactly what that demand profile requires.
Nations turning new designs into finished hardware fastest will dominate industrial strength," says Mislav Tolusic, managing partner at Marlinspike.
That framing is not about business returns. It is about geopolitical competition, and it explains why a defense-adjacent investor led a $100 million Series A in an autonomous factory company.
Why this matters for the humanoid ecosystem
Foundry is not a humanoid robot company in the traditional sense. It builds factories that use robots, including humanoids from various manufacturers, to assemble hardware.
But it represents something the broader robotics industry needs urgently: proof that autonomous assembly works at commercial scale.
The gap between "robot that can do the task in a lab" and "robot that can do the task reliably on a production line" is where most deployments fail. Foundry's entire model is built around closing that gap, and FoundryOS exists precisely to give robots an intelligent substrate for real manufacturing environments, not just controlled demonstrations.
If Foundry can make this work at scale across defense and commercial customers, the playbook becomes a template ... a model for how American autonomous manufacturing gets rebuilt from the ground up.
And not just American, either. Perhaps European as well.
Sources
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I tell stories with data and build startups. I've raised angel and VC funds, led software companies and startups, and chronicled the rise of the mobile economy. Currently I write for Forbes, host several podcasts, and am starting up HumanoidMegaHub. I was TUNE's mobile economist and Singular's VP of Insights, built the research team at VentureBeat, and managed teams creating software for partners like Intel and Disney. In past lives I built websites, e-learning platforms, and mobile apps, and, a long time ago, was named to Folio's top 100 of the media industry's "most innovative entrepreneurs and market shaker-uppers.”