A Startup With a Bankrupt Fintech CEO and a President’s Son Wants to Build America’s Robot Army
April 26, 2026 – 12:27 pm
TL;DR:
Foundation Future Industries, a San Francisco startup whose CEO previously ran a bankrupt fintech, has secured $24 million in Pentagon research contracts to test humanoid robots for breaching enemy positions. Two Phantom MK-1 units were sent to Ukraine in February for logistics and reconnaissance testing—the first deployment of humanoid robots to any theatre of combat.
The Machine
The Phantom MK-1 is a 5-foot-9, 176-pound humanoid robot with:
- 19 upper-body degrees of freedom
- Five-fingered hands
- A camera-first vision system
- An LLM-driven autonomy stack that blends independent operation with supervised teleoperation
It walks at 1.7 meters per second, carries a 44-pound payload, and uses proprietary cycloidal actuators delivering up to 160 newton-meters of torque. Its AI stack translates high-level task instructions into motion through an LLM pipeline, with operators retaining final authority over lethal decisions.
The company’s key details:
- Cost: Approximately $150,000 per unit; a lease model is also available for $100,000 per year.
- Production Targets: 40 units in 2025, 10,000 in 2026, and 50,000 by the end of 2027, with a steady-state target of 30,000 per year.
- Funding: Requires a manufacturing scale-up of 250 times on a total funding base of roughly $21 million.
The Team
Founded by:
- Sankaet Pathak: Previously CEO of Synapse, a banking-as-a-service platform that filed for bankruptcy in 2024.
- Arjun Sethi: CEO of Tribe Capital, which led Foundation’s $11 million pre-seed round.
- Mike LeBlanc: A 14-year Marine Corps veteran and co-founder of Cobalt Robotics, providing military credibility.
Controversy: The company’s chief strategy adviser is Eric Trump, son of the sitting president, prompting Senator Elizabeth Warren to call the Pentagon contracts “corruption in plain sight.”