Foundation debuts Phantom MK-1, its industrial and defence humanoid

Foundation, a San Francisco-based humanoid robotics company founded in 2023, debuted its Phantom MK-1 humanoid robot in April 2025. The company had raised approximately $11 million in a pre-seed round in August 2023 from Tribe Capital and angel investors, targeting industrial automation and defence applications.

The founders

Foundation was co-founded by Sankaet Pathak, Arjun Sethi, and Mike LeBlanc. Pathak previously co-founded Synapse, a banking-as-a-service platform that filed for bankruptcy in 2024, leaving tens of millions in customer deposits unaccounted for. Sethi is CEO of Tribe Capital, which led Foundation's pre-seed and is a co-founder. LeBlanc is a 14-year Marine Corps veteran and co-founder of Cobalt Robotics, a security robotics company. The three founders span fintech infrastructure, venture capital, and military operations, an unusual combination for a robotics startup, and one that directly shapes the company's market positioning.

In December 2024, Foundation acquired Boardwalk Robotics. Boardwalk was co-founded by Jerry Pratt, one of the most experienced walking robot researchers in the United States, whose earlier work at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition spanned more than two decades of bipedal locomotion research. The acquisition brought locomotion research heritage into Foundation's stack alongside a team it has described as drawn from Tesla, Boston Dynamics, SpaceX, and 1X.

The robot

Phantom MK-1 stands five feet nine inches tall and uses cameras rather than LiDAR as its primary sensing approach, a deliberate design choice intended to simplify data integration and improve reliability in uncontrolled environments. The robot runs proprietary cycloid actuators that the company claims provide 90 to 95 percent energy efficiency alongside backdrivability and quieter operation than conventional geared systems. Foundation's software approach combines state-based models with imitation learning and an LLM-driven task-to-motion pipeline.

Foundation's website shows the robot in industrial pilots across consumer goods, beverage, and glass manufacturing environments alongside its stated defence positioning. The industrial side is the less-covered half of what the company is building; the manufacturing pilots represent Foundation's attempt to build commercial traction before defence contracts can scale. Foundation's unit cost is approximately $150,000 with a lease model available at $100,000 per year.

Production and targets

Pathak told Forbes the company shipped 40 robots in 2025, targeting 10,000 units in 2026 and 40,000 to 50,000 by end of 2027. He described the plan as aggressive and acknowledged a non-zero chance the company could achieve it. Those production targets would require a 250-fold manufacturing scale-up in two years on a total disclosed funding base of roughly $21 million at the time of the Phantom debut.

Maturity

Foundation shipped 40 robots in 2025 against targets of 10,000 in 2026. No independent verification of industrial pilot performance, task cycle rates, or uptime data has been published. The company's defence positioning is explicit, its industrial deployment data is thin, and its production targets require a manufacturing ramp that its disclosed capital base does not obviously support.

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