Company opens 130,000-square-foot facility in Emeryville, adding fast, flexible domestic assembly capacity for defense and industrial hardware

EMERYVILLE, Calif.: Foundry Robotics today announced its oversubscribed $100 million Series A funding round 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.

Foundry 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.

Foundry 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. 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 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.”

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.

“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 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. FoundryOS serves as a single agentic system linking the robots, the factory floor and the cloud. Every production run feeds back into the models, so the same cell that assembles a drone today can learn to build a satellite component tomorrow, and 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.”

Adarsh Kulkarni co-founded Foundry with Emmanuel Lamacchia, the former Program Manager for the Tesla Model Y program. Adarsh brings robotics and defense industry experience, as employee number 4 at Ghost Robotics, where he built legged robots for the U.S. military, and later was Scale AI’s inaugural Head of Robotics. He built partnerships with companies like Generalist AI and Physical Intelligence while ushering in the modern third-party robotics data industry. Emmanuel was the single-threaded owner for Tesla’s Model Y, the best selling car in the world – responsible for manufacturing ~1.5 million cars a year. The company’s leadership team also includes former Tesla software leader Anup Karmakar and former Marine, Army, and Air Force veterans who worked at Raytheon and Northrop Grumman.

About Foundry Robotics

Foundry Robotics builds and operates autonomous factories for assembly, offering manufacturing-as-a-service for defense and commercial industries. Founded in 2026 and based in Emeryville, Foundry is backed by Marlinspike Partners, Khosla Ventures, Red Glass Ventures, SE Ventures, Hanabi, Wing VC, and other investors. Learn more at foundryrobotics.ai.

Fonte: Business Wire