Foundation

Current platform

Phantom MK1

Foundation (also Foundation Future Industries; founded 2024, headquartered in San Francisco with an office in Munich) was co-founded by CEO Sankaet Pathak, who previously co-founded the fintech Synapse, which went bankrupt in 2024, along with Tribe Capital's Arjun Sethi and former Cobalt Robotics co-founder Mike LeBlanc, with Eric Trump as chief strategy adviser. Its Phantom MK1 is a general-purpose humanoid with company-stated specs of 5 feet 9 inches and 176 pounds, 19 upper-body degrees of freedom, five-fingered hands, eight cameras and no LiDAR, proprietary rolling-contact gearboxes, about 20 kg of payload, roughly 1.7 m/s, an initially tethered power setup, and a large-language-model-driven autonomy stack, at a stated price near $150,000. The company raised about $11 million in a Tribe Capital-led pre-seed for a roughly $21 million base and won a $24 million Pentagon SBIR that is explicitly a research agreement rather than a production order, and it sent two MK1 units to Ukraine in February 2026 for logistics and reconnaissance testing rather than combat. A framing correction is worth recording: the dispatch described Foundation as a manufacturing and logistics humanoid startup, but its live public posture in mid-2026 is defense and military, even as manufacturing and logistics remain the stated original target. The registry records it at research and demo maturity with elevated skepticism, because there is no verifiable customer deployment, the Ukraine testing carries no independent outcome data, and, critically, a June 2024 Foundation fundraising deck claimed General Motors would be its first customer with a roughly $300 million purchase order and factory access, a claim GM flatly denied, saying it had never invested and had no plans to. Its production targets of 40 units in 2025 scaling to 50,000 in 2027, its efficiency and fast-learning performance claims, any GM relationship, the Ukraine operational outcomes, and a $3 billion-plus valuation are all recorded as claimed-but-not-verified.