Foundry Robotics raises $100M Series A to build autonomous factories-as-a-service, ten months after founding

Foundry Robotics has raised a $100M Series A ten months after founding, and is simultaneously unveiling a 130,000 square foot autonomous factory facility in Emeryville, California. The company, led by founder Adarsh Kulkarni, builds and operates robotics-first factories as a service, handling assembly for customers across defense, telecom, and advanced manufacturing.

The model is straightforward: customers pay for manufacturing output without managing the underlying robotics. Foundry handles assembly — precise placement, cabling, fastening — across a rotating mix of products. Kulkarni says the company currently has six or seven paying customers, including Huntington Ingalls Industries, which uses Foundry for autonomous submarine work. Robot dogs, drones, and telecom hardware round out the current mix.

“Foundry builds autonomous factories. We build factories from the ground up, orient them towards robotics and autonomy. We actually provide manufacturing as a service to our customers so they don't have to pay attention to how many robots are involved. We are announcing our Series A fundraise — it's $100M. The company's ten months old. We're also unveiling our 130,000 square foot facility in Emeryville.”

High-mix, high-volume

Kulkarni frames Foundry's positioning around a quadrant most manufacturers treat as impossible: high-mix, high-volume. Traditional factory economics push companies toward either product variety or scale, not both. Foundry's bet is that a robotics-first facility, optimized for assembly across product types, accumulates data and model improvements that make it better at building everything — the more products it runs, the stronger the underlying system gets.

That compounding logic is also why he thinks large customers won't eventually pull production in-house. His cofounder ran the Model Y program at Tesla, where the most recent launch required $1 billion in CapEx. A company scaling to a million drones a year will never invest the same engineering depth into the factory that Foundry does, because for Foundry, the factory is the product.

Defense pull

The defense angle is where Foundry's near-term demand is clearest. Kulkarni notes that modern defense procurement has shifted from buying five fighter jets a year to needing millions of drones — a volume and variety problem that maps directly onto Foundry's model. The HII engagement on autonomous surface and undersea vehicles is described as a serious production relationship, not a pilot.

The cloud analogy

Kulkarni's larger argument is that Foundry does for hardware what cloud computing did for software. No YC company today thinks about buying servers; Kulkarni wants hardware startups to stop thinking about building factories. If that plays out, he argues the hardware moat shifts from manufacturing capability toward design excellence — Foundry handles production, the drone or satellite company focuses on what it's actually building.

The analogy has real traction in the current environment. What's harder to assess at ten months old is whether Foundry's data and model compounding actually delivers the unit economics it promises as product complexity increases — that's the proof point Kulkarni says he's actively measuring with early customers.