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Foundation is an American humanoid robot company headquartered in San Francisco, California, that develops a general-purpose humanoid called Phantom and markets it for both industrial automation and military use. The company was co-founded in April 2024 by Sankaet Pathak, Arjun Sethi, and Mike LeBlanc, and is led by Pathak as chief executive. It operates under the legal name Foundation Robotics Labs, has also been referred to in press coverage and filings as Foundation Future Industries, and presents itself publicly simply as Foundation (on the domain foundation.bot). Foundation became one of the most closely watched and controversial entrants in the humanoid sector for two reasons unrelated to its technology: its founder previously ran the failed fintech Synapse, whose 2024 bankruptcy left hundreds of millions of dollars in customer funds frozen, and the company has openly pursued weaponized military robots while recruiting Eric Trump, son of the sitting U.S. president, as a strategy adviser.
This article covers the company. For the robot itself, including detailed hardware and AI specifications, see Foundation Phantom MK1.
"Foundation" is a heavily reused name, and this company is frequently confused with unrelated things. It is not connected to the Isaac Asimov Foundation science-fiction novels or the Apple TV+ series based on them, nor to the concept of foundation models in artificial intelligence (large pretrained models such as GPT or Gemini), nor to the related idea of a robot foundation model. Several other companies also use the name "Foundation," including a construction-software firm and a developer-infrastructure startup; this article concerns only the humanoid-robotics company that builds the Phantom robot. The legal entity is Foundation Robotics Labs, which is distinct from similarly named ventures, and the company is sometimes called Foundation Future Industries in regulatory and contracting contexts.
Foundation was started in April 2024 by three co-founders. Sankaet Pathak serves as chief executive. Arjun Sethi, co-founder and chief executive of the venture-capital firm Tribe Capital, joined as a co-founder after Pathak approached him about fundraising and Sethi expressed his own interest in humanoid robotics. Mike LeBlanc, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran with more than a decade of service including deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, came on as the third co-founder; LeBlanc had previously co-founded Cobalt Robotics, a maker of autonomous security-guard robots. LeBlanc's combat background has shaped the company's defense-oriented strategy.
The company is based in San Francisco. Press accounts have described a roughly 50-person team as of 2025, with engineering and manufacturing talent recruited from Tesla, Boston Dynamics, SpaceX, and 1X Technologies, as well as researchers connected to the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) and the Technical University of Munich. The company's stated mission, in Pathak's framing, is to "automate GDP" through AI and robotics so that people can be freed from manual labor.
Shortly after forming, Foundation acquired Boardwalk Robotics, a Florida-based robotics company founded in 2017 that had been a commercial partner of IHMC, a research institute with a long pedigree in bipedal robotics (IHMC placed second in the DARPA Robotics Challenge finals and helped NASA teach its Valkyrie humanoid to walk). Boardwalk had built a commercial upper-body humanoid called Alex and had worked with IHMC on a research platform named Nadia. Through the acquisition Foundation absorbed Boardwalk's engineering team and its actuator technology, and the Alex hardware lineage was rebranded and further developed into the Phantom. One of Foundation's U.S. government research awards, an Air Force Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract reportedly worth about $1.8 million, was inherited through Boardwalk.
Foundation's profile is inseparable from the prior career of its founder. Before Foundation, Sankaet Pathak founded and ran Synapse, a banking-as-a-service (BaaS) company established in 2014 that acted as a middleman connecting fintech apps that lacked banking charters, including Mercury, Dave, and the savings app Yotta, to regional banks that held customer deposits. Synapse raised tens of millions of dollars from investors including Andreessen Horowitz.
Synapse filed for bankruptcy in April 2024 after its relationship with its main partner, Evolve Bank & Trust, deteriorated. Because of poor internal accounting and disputed ledgers, roughly $200 million of end-customer funds were frozen across dependent apps when the company collapsed, and reporting later indicated that as much as $95 million remained missing nearly a year afterward. The episode triggered a U.S. Justice Department criminal investigation into the collapse; as of mid-2026, no charges against Pathak had been reported, and reporting noted there was no clear public evidence that he had personally committed fraud. Pathak has discussed the failure publicly, and in one interview said there is "no shame in failing, unless it's catastrophic."
Coverage in outlets including Fortune, American Banker, and The Information repeatedly framed Foundation's fundraising around the same person who had presided over the Synapse losses, often noting the contrast between the unresolved customer funds and the willingness of venture investors to back his new robotics venture. Foundation and the Synapse company are the same founder's ventures; aside from Pathak, they are otherwise unrelated businesses.
Foundation began raising money before it had a product. According to The Information and TechCrunch, the company secured roughly $11 million in early funding (variously described as a pre-seed or seed round) backed by Tribe Capital and angel investors, with that round publicly confirmed by Pathak in August 2024. By 2025 the total raised had grown to roughly $21 million.
In May 2025, TechCrunch and others reported that Pathak was attempting to raise about $100 million at a $1 billion valuation, an ambitious target given that Foundation had only just unveiled its Phantom robot. By early 2026, reporting (including by Newcomer) indicated Foundation was seeking as much as $500 million in a new round at a valuation of roughly $3 billion or more, with some accounts citing follow-on investor demand at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation. These later figures are reported fundraising targets rather than confirmed closed rounds, and should be read as such.
| Round / event | Date | Amount | Valuation | Source(s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Early (pre-seed / seed) | Confirmed Aug 2024 | ~$11 million | Not disclosed | The Information, TechCrunch, American Banker |
| Cumulative raised | By 2025 | ~$21 million total | Not disclosed | The Next Web, Newsweek |
| Reported raise target | May 2025 | ~$100 million (target) | ~$1 billion (target) | TechCrunch |
| Reported raise target | Jan-2026 | Up to $500 million (target) | ~$3 billion+; up to $3.5B demand | Newcomer, Newsweek |
Separately, Foundation holds approximately $24 million in U.S. government defense research contracts, described below.
In June 2024, shortly after the company was formed, CNBC reported that Foundation was raising the final $1 million of its $11 million round using fundraising materials that overstated a relationship with General Motors. The documents reportedly claimed GM would be Foundation's first customer with a targeted $300 million purchase order, that GM was set to invest, and that GM had agreed to let Foundation collect "ground truth" training data inside its factories. General Motors flatly denied this. A GM spokesman, Darryll Harrison, said: "GM has never invested in Foundation Robotics and has no plans to do so. In fact, GM has never had an agreement of any kind with the company. Any claims to the contrary are fabricated." Co-founder Mike LeBlanc confirmed GM's position in an interview and said he was embarrassed that marketing materials existed that overstated the relationship. The episode, surfacing within weeks of the Synapse bankruptcy, contributed to early skepticism about the company's claims.
Foundation's sole product is the Phantom humanoid robot. The first generation, the Phantom MK1 (also written Phantom MK-1), is a roughly 175 cm (5 ft 9 in), 80 kg (about 176 lb) bipedal humanoid with 19 upper-body degrees of freedom, five-fingered hands, a camera-only perception system (eight head-mounted cameras, no LiDAR), and a hybrid AI stack that pairs a large language model for high-level task planning with proprietary physics-based action models for low-level control. A distinguishing engineering feature, inherited from Boardwalk Robotics, is the use of proprietary cycloidal rolling-contact actuators, for which Foundation claims high energy efficiency and torque density relative to the harmonic drives common in competing humanoids. Foundation markets the robot on a lease model at roughly $100,000 per year per unit, with early small-volume build costs cited around $150,000 per unit.
The company has said it is developing a successor, variously referred to as Phantom MK2 or Phantom 2, intended to address limitations exposed in early deployments such as a lack of waterproofing and limited battery life. Full hardware, AI, and deployment details are covered in the dedicated article, Foundation Phantom MK1.
Foundation has pursued an early commercial strategy of placing small numbers of robots into high-turnover industrial roles, collecting operational data, and improving autonomy over time. By late 2025 the company reported having built on the order of 10 Phantoms used by paying clients, described in press accounts as including an automaker in the Atlanta area and two consumer-goods manufacturers.
Foundation is unusual among Western humanoid-robot makers for openly embracing military applications. Many leading robotics companies, including Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, ANYbotics, Clearpath, and Unitree, signed a 2023 joint pledge not to weaponize their general-purpose robots; Foundation has explicitly declined to take that position and has framed defense as central to its purpose.
Foundation has secured approximately $24 million in U.S. government research contracts spanning the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force, covering feasibility testing in areas such as inspection, logistics, and weapons handling. The awards have been described as falling under the SBIR program, including a Phase III designation that effectively positions the company as an approved military vendor; part of the total (an Air Force SBIR award of roughly $1.8 million) was inherited through the Boardwalk Robotics acquisition. The company and its advisers have publicly framed the contracts as a way to maintain a U.S. edge over China in robotics.
In February 2026, Foundation sent two Phantom MK-1 units to Ukraine for testing during the Russia-Ukraine war, which the company described as the first known deployment of a humanoid robot to an active combat theater. The robots were used for support tasks in hazardous areas, primarily logistics runs (such as supply pickups) and reconnaissance, rather than combat; as multiple outlets noted at the time, no humanoid robot had fired a weapon in the conflict. Press accounts highlighted practical limits exposed by the trial, including the MK1's lack of waterproofing and limited battery runtime. The deployment was coordinated with Ukrainian officials and reported to involve U.S. government support, and it generated substantial international media coverage. Foundation has stated a goal of getting Phantom robots onto U.S. front lines within roughly 12 to 18 months.
Foundation's leadership has gone further than most peers in discussing weaponization. In a CNET hands-on demonstration, Pathak said that first-line-of-defense use cases "would require arming them with guns" and that "pretty much all of those things are on the table," in what reporters described as the most direct acknowledgment from a major U.S. humanoid CEO that the platform is being considered for active weaponization. Foundation has also framed the appeal of robots in war as sending a machine as a "bullet sponge instead of a soldier," and LeBlanc has argued there is a "moral imperative" to send robots into combat in place of people. The company maintains that lethal decisions would remain under human control (a human-in-the-loop model) and that its current government contracts do not authorize arming the robots.
Foundation recruited Eric Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization and son of U.S. President Donald Trump, as its chief strategy adviser. According to the company, Eric Trump had been an investor in Foundation before becoming an adviser. He publicly promoted the company's $24 million Pentagon contract, including an April 2026 appearance on Fox Business, casting the work as part of competing with China. The arrangement drew political criticism: Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren characterized the award of government contracts to a company advised by the president's son as "corruption in plain sight," and outlets including Democracy Now! and Mediaite covered the conflict-of-interest concerns. As of mid-2026, no formal finding of wrongdoing related to the contracts had been reported.
Foundation has set production goals that are aggressive relative to the broader humanoid industry, where only a few hundred general-purpose humanoids were operational across all manufacturers as of early 2026. Pathak has acknowledged the targets are aggressive while maintaining there is a "non-zero chance" of hitting them.
| Year | Target | Status (as reported) |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 | ~40 units (some accounts cite 40-50) | ~10 Phantoms reported built and in client use by late 2025 |
| 2026 | 10,000 units | Stated target |
| 2027 | 50,000 units (by year end) | Stated target |
Reaching 50,000 units by 2027 from a 2025 base of dozens would require an enormous manufacturing scale-up. The company has discussed establishing U.S. manufacturing across multiple states, with Ohio named among locations under consideration, and a longer-run steady-state output cited in the tens of thousands of units per year.
Foundation has attracted attention disproportionate to its size, driven by the combination of its founder's history, its defense ambitions, and its political ties. Skeptics have pointed to the Synapse bankruptcy and the 2024 GM-claims episode as reasons for caution about the company's representations, and to the gap between its production targets and its modest funding and output. Robotics ethicists and some military analysts have criticized the open pursuit of armed humanoids, contrasting it with the industry's 2023 no-weaponization pledge. At the same time, the company's hardware approach (in particular its cycloidal actuators) and its willingness to put a robot into a live conflict zone earned it serious coverage in technology and defense press. The Eric Trump advisory role and the federal contracts drew explicit conflict-of-interest objections from members of Congress.