Foundry Robotics has closed an oversubscribed $100 million Series A led by Marlinspike Partners, with Khosla Ventures, Red Glass Ventures, SE Ventures, Wing VC, Axiom Ventures, Hanabi and Zero Shot Fund participating. The company builds and operates autonomous factories for complex assembly, pairing AI-powered robotic cells with manufacturing specialists. Proceeds will expand its Emeryville facility, accelerate deployment of AI models into production and grow its research, engineering and factory-operations teams.
Key takeaways
- Foundry has expanded its manufacturing footprint twentyfold to a 130,000-square-foot facility in Emeryville, serving defense and commercial customers on high-value, complex electro-mechanical products where production is constrained.
- Target applications include drones, autonomous vehicle subassemblies, wire harnesses, underwater vehicles, telecom and data center infrastructure, ground robots, rugged computers, robot compute boxes and satellites.
- AI models trained on assembly building blocks run in a grid of robotic cells with manufacturing-grade precision; FoundryOS acts as a single agentic system linking robots, the factory floor and the cloud.
- Each production run feeds back into the models, so a cell assembling a drone can later learn a satellite component and improve on both.
- Under a manufacturing-as-a-service model, Foundry owns and operates the factory, taking customers from design to production in weeks without new line investment or retooling.
The company argues that traditional assembly lines are built around a single product, take months to deploy and are costly to reconfigure, making manufacturing the bottleneck as defense and industrial firms design hardware faster. Founder and CEO Adarsh Kulkarni said the approach is to own the entire final assembly stack and integrate intelligence at every layer. Duane Fotheringham, president of HII Unmanned Systems, described autonomous assembly as the kind of capability the defense industrial base needs now. Kulkarni co-founded the company with Emmanuel Lamacchia, former program manager for the Tesla Model Y.
Source: Robotics & Automation News · Published 2026-10-31T08:08:56 · “Foundry Robotics raises $100 million to build ‘America’s first autonomous factory for assembly’”