An Emeryville manufacturing startup just pulled in a nine-figure check to put more robots on its factory floor. Foundry Robotics announced a $100 million Series A funding round, money the company says will go toward expanding its local facility and pushing its AI models deeper into real-world production lines.
The round was led by Marlinspike Partners, according to PYMNTS, and brought in a long list of backers including Khosla Ventures, Red Glass Ventures and Hanabi Capital, plus new entrants SE Ventures, Wing VC and Axiom Ventures, as VentureBurn reports. Zero Shot Fund also joined the round, per FinSMEs. Foundry did not disclose a valuation tied to the raise, according to runtimewire.com.
Foundry Robotics is led by founder and CEO Adarsh Kulkarni, with Emmanuel Lamacchia serving as co-founder — someone VentureBurn describes as bringing deep knowledge of how factories actually run. The company builds and operates what it calls autonomous factories for complex assembly, combining AI-powered robotic cells with manufacturing experts under a model known as manufacturing-as-a-service, meaning Foundry owns and runs the factories itself rather than simply selling robots to other manufacturers, per the same VentureBurn report.
What Foundry Actually Builds
The company's target list skews toward hardware that's notoriously hard to automate: drones, autonomous-vehicle subassemblies, satellites, wire harnesses and other complex products, according to app.dealroom.co. FinSMEs adds underwater vehicles and telecom and data center infrastructure to that roster. Foundry serves both defense and commercial customers, with PYMNTS noting the company's emphasis on “high-value, complex” electro-mechanical products that face production constraints.
Tying it all together is FoundryOS, software that links the company's robots, its factory floor and its cloud systems, the VentureBurn report notes. Foundry says the platform can take a product from design to production in a matter of weeks, without forcing customers to invest in a new production line or undergo costly retooling — a pitch the company frames around physical AI delivering assembly capacity that deploys quickly, adapts to different products and scales with demand, according to PYMNTS.
A Much Bigger Emeryville Footprint
Where exactly that capacity is landing depends on which account you read. VentureBurn reports Foundry will launch a 130,000-square-foot AI-powered assembly factory in Emeryville, while PYMNTS describes the company as having already expanded its manufacturing footprint twentyfold to a 130,000-square-foot facility there — two slightly different pictures of the same expansion. Separately, bizjournals.com reports that Foundry relocated its headquarters from San Francisco's Mission Bay to a larger East Bay facility.
Whatever the precise sequencing, the money is earmarked for growth. Foundry plans to use the funding to build out its Emeryville facility, accelerate the deployment of its AI models into real-world manufacturing, and grow its robotics research, engineering and factory-operations teams, per FinSMEs.
Riding a Robotics Funding Wave
Foundry's raise lands in the middle of a broad surge in capital flowing toward robotics. Global venture funding for robotics startups totaled $9.9 billion in the third quarter of 2026, more than double the $4.3 billion invested in the same quarter a year earlier, according to Crunchbase News. Funding to the sector through the first three quarters of 2026 is up roughly 185% year over year, the outlet reports.
The momentum shows up in physical order volumes too. North American companies ordered 10,989 robots worth $723.5 million in the third quarter of 2026, an increase of 24.8% in units and 26.1% in value compared with the same period in 2025, according to Business Wire. Orders for automotive-component robots alone climbed 90.4% year over year, the same report notes. Earlier in the year, robotics and physical-AI startups raised a record $18.6 billion across 450 deals in the second quarter, with deal value up 25.3% from the prior quarter even as the number of deals fell, according to PitchBook.
Foundry's $100 million sits alongside a handful of other large robotics raises this year, including Skild AI's $1.4 billion round for its Skild Brain foundation model and Xpeng Robotics' $900 million raise, both cited by Crunchbase News. Closer to Foundry's size, Maven Robotics announced its own $100 million Series A while Arda Industries launched with $232 million, according to app.dealroom.co, which also notes that Foundry's round ranks in the top 3% of all U.S. deep-tech Series A rounds on record.
For now, Foundry is using its fresh venture capital the way runtimewire.com describes it — to own factory capacity outright while simultaneously building out the robotics software meant to run it. That dual bet, on physical infrastructure and on the AI meant to operate it, is what's drawing investors to a company that, until this round, was just another name in a crowded East Bay manufacturing corridor.
