The California-based autonomous factory creator Foundry Robotics has raised $100 million of venture capital to expand its 130,000-square-foot facility in Emeryville, near San Francisco, adding fast, flexible domestic assembly capacity for defense and industrial hardware.
Foundry says that defense and industrial companies can design new hardware faster than ever, but manufacturing remains a critical bottleneck. Traditional assembly lines are built around a single product, take months to deploy, and are costly to reconfigure. Foundry takes a different approach, leveraging physical AI to build flexible assembly capacity that deploys quickly, adapts to different products, and scales with demand.
So the firm builds and operates autonomous factories for complex assembly, combining AI-powered robotic cells with experienced manufacturing experts. With the new funding, Foundry will build out its Emeryville facility, accelerate deployment of AI models into real-world manufacturing, and grow its robotics research, engineering, and factory operations teams.
Through its manufacturing-as-a-service model, Foundry owns and operates the factory, taking customers from design to production in weeks without new production line investments or expensive retooling. Foundry trains AI models on the building blocks of assembly and deploys these models in a grid of robotic “cells” with manufacturing-grade precision.
The company currently serves defense and commercial industries, focusing on high-value, complex electro-mechanical products where production is constrained. Applications include drones, autonomous vehicle subassemblies, wire harnesses, underwater vehicles, telecom/data center infrastructure, ground robots, rugged computers, robot compute boxes, satellites, and more.
“We believe the factories that revive America’s manufacturing sector will need to be rethought from the ground up rather than retrofitting one aspect in an existing factory,” said Adarsh Kulkarni, Founder and CEO of Foundry Robotics. “Our approach is to own the entire final assembly stack and integrate intelligence at every layer – own the buildings that manufacture for our customers while orienting them for robotics deployment. Our mission is to revitalize U.S. manufacturing and create more capacity to build and scale critical product assembly.”
The “series A” funding round was led by Marlinspike Partners. Participating in the round are early backers Khosla Ventures and Red Glass Ventures, and new investors SE Ventures, Wing VC, and Axiom Ventures, as well as existing investors Hanabi and Zero Shot Fund.
