Foundry Robotics raises $100M Series A to build autonomous factory for assembly

California-based startup Foundry Robotics announced its oversubscribed $100 million Series A funding round led by Marlinspike Partners.

Foundry said that it builds and operates autonomous factories for complex assembly, combining AI-powered robotic cells with experienced manufacturing experts.

The company said that early backers Khosla Ventures and Red Glass Ventures participated in this funding round, alongside new investors SE Ventures, Wing VC and Axiom Ventures, as well as existing investors Hanabi and Zero Shot Fund.

Foundry builds out manufacturing facility

With the new funding, Foundry said that it will build out its Emeryville, Calif. facility, accelerate deployment of AI models into real-world manufacturing, and grow its robotics research, engineering and factory operations teams.

Foundry said that it has expanded its manufacturing footprint twentyfold to a 130,000-square-foot facility in Emeryville. The company currently serves defense and commercial industries, focusing on high-value, complex electro-mechanical products where production is constrained.

The company said that applications include:

• Drones
• Autonomous vehicle subassemblies
• Wire harnesses
• Underwater vehicles
• Telecom/data center infrastructure
• Ground robots
• Rugged computers
• Robot compute boxes
• Satellites, and more.

Foundry said that it has also expanded its multidisciplinary team, bringing together robotics researchers, AI and software engineers, and experienced manufacturing experts to develop, deploy and continuously improve its technology directly on the factory floor.

“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 company said that while defense and industrial companies can design new hardware faster than ever, manufacturing remains a critical bottleneck. Foundry said that traditional assembly lines are built around a single product, take months to deploy, and are costly to reconfigure.

The company said that it takes a different approach, utilizing physical AI to build flexible assembly capacity that deploys quickly, adapts to different products and scales with demand.

“Production capacity is a national constraint on getting unmanned systems to the fleet,” said Duane Fotheringham, president, HII Unmanned Systems. “Foundry's approach to autonomous assembly is exactly the kind of capability the defense industrial base needs right now.”

Through its manufacturing-as-a-service model, Foundry said that it owns and operates the factory, taking customers from design to production in weeks without new production line investments or expensive retooling. Foundry said that it 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 said that FoundryOS serves as a single agentic system linking the robots, the factory floor and the cloud. Foundry said that since every production run feeds back into the models, the same cell that assembles a drone today can learn to build a satellite component tomorrow. The company added that it gets better at both with every run.

“The next era of industrial strength will belong to nations that can turn new designs into finished hardware the fastest,” said Mislav Tolusic, managing partner at Marlinspike. “Defense and industrial equipment manufacturers urgently need more domestic assembly capacity, and Foundry is delivering. Their AI-powered factory offers scalable and flexible assembly capacity. We are impressed with the speed that Adarsh and Emmanuel are executing - assembling an impressive team, commissioning the first factory, and quickly signing customers."