Foundry Robotics Raises $100m for Its AI Factory

Foundry Robotics, a California start-up that runs factories where AI-driven robot cells assemble other companies’ hardware, has raised a $100m Series A led by Marlinspike Partners. The company says its 130,000 sq ft site in Emeryville is already shipping products to paying customers, ten months after it started.

The round was announced in a release, by founder and chief executive Adarsh Kulkarni on X and by the company’s own account. Foundry calls the round oversubscribed. It did not disclose a valuation or revenue.

Khosla returns as Marlinspike leads

Early backers Khosla Ventures and Red Glass Ventures joined the round, along with new investors SE Ventures, Wing VC and Axiom Ventures, and existing investors Hanabi and Zero Shot Fund. Foundry says the money will go on building out the Emeryville facility, putting AI models to work in real manufacturing and hiring for robotics research, engineering and factory operations.

“The next era of industrial strength will belong to nations that can turn new designs into finished hardware the fastest,” said Mislav Tolusic, a managing partner at Marlinspike.

Manufacturing as a service

Foundry does not sell robots. It owns and runs the factory and builds products for customers, a model it calls manufacturing-as-a-service. It says it can take a customer from design to production “in weeks”, without the customer paying for a new production line or retooling.

The company trains AI models on basic assembly tasks and runs them in a grid of robotic “cells”. Its software, FoundryOS, links the robots, the factory floor and the cloud. Foundry says every production run feeds back into the models, so a cell that assembles one product can learn to build another. Its site describes an approach it calls design for robotic assembly, which simplifies products and cuts parts so robots can build them repeatably.

The site has grown twentyfold, according to the release. Foundry focuses on complex electro-mechanical products where production is short of capacity. It lists drones, autonomous vehicle subassemblies, wire harnesses, underwater vehicles, telecoms and data-centre hardware, ground robots, rugged computers and satellites. Kulkarni said on X that paying customers span energy, telecoms, autonomous vehicles and defence.

“Our approach is to own the entire final assembly stack and integrate intelligence at every layer,” Kulkarni said.

Founders from Scale AI and Tesla

Kulkarni was the fourth employee at Ghost Robotics, which builds legged robots, and later Scale AI’s first head of robotics. His co-founder, Emmanuel Lamacchia, was programme manager for Tesla’s Model Y. The leadership team also includes former Tesla software leader Anup Karmakar and military veterans who worked at Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. The release says Foundry was founded in 2026.

The release also quotes Duane Fotheringham, president of HII Unmanned Systems, a unit of the US shipbuilder HII: “Production capacity is a national constraint on getting unmanned systems to the fleet.” Foundry did not say whether HII is a customer.

Owning the factory is the expensive part

Most robotics start-ups sell machines and leave customers to fit them into existing lines. Foundry is taking on the factory itself, which means its funding pays for buildings and equipment as well as software. That is costly, but it lets the company control the whole process and collect data from every run, which is the basis of its claim that cells improve over time.

The test is whether one set of cells can switch reliably between very different products. Flexible automation has long promised this, and assembly lines built for a single product are still the norm because they are predictable. Foundry has not published throughput, defect rates or how often its cells change products, so its claims are hard to judge from outside.

Demand is on its side. North American robot orders rose 24.8% in the third quarter, and investors are backing US production at scale, from Re:Build’s $2.1bn round to Bedrock Robotics’ driverless diggers. Foundry’s next milestone is naming customers and showing output figures from Emeryville.