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 to breach enemy positions. Two Phantom MK-1 units were sent to Ukraine in February for logistics and reconnaissance testing. The company’s top strategic advisor is Eric Trump, prompting Senator Warren to call the contracts “corruption in plain sight.” The Foundation is seeking $500 million at a valuation of more than $3 billion, but its production goals of 50,000 units by 2027 from a base of 40 require a 250-fold increase on roughly $21 million in total funding.
Foundation Future Industries, a San Francisco startup founded in April 2024, has secured $24 million in research contracts with the US Army, Navy and Air Force to test humanoid robots designed to breach enemy positions. The company’s MK-1 Phantom is a 5-foot-9, 176-pound humanoid with 19 degrees of freedom in the upper body, five-fingered hands, a camera-based vision system, and an LLM-powered autonomy stack that combines independent operation with supervised teleoperation. Two units were sent to Ukraine in February for front-line testing in logistics and reconnaissance, described as the first deployment of humanoid robots in any combat theater. The company is seeking $500 million in new financing at a valuation of more than $3 billion. His main strategic advisor is Eric Trump, son of the sitting president, a detail that led Senator Elizabeth Warren to call the Pentagon “contracts.”corruption in a simple breath“t.” The company’s CEO previously led a fintech startup that went bankrupt and left tens of millions in consumer deposits unaccounted for.
the machine
The Phantom MK-1 walks at 1.7 meters per second, carries a 44-pound payload, runs eight cameras without bulky LiDAR, and uses patented cycloidal actuators that deliver up to 160 newton-meters of torque. Its AI stack translates high-level task instructions into motion through an LLM process, with operators retaining final authority over lethal decisions. Unit cost is approximately $150,000, with a lease model available at $100,000 per year. The MK-2, due this month, consolidates electronics to reduce the risk of short circuits, adds waterproofing and larger battery packs, increases payload capacity to 175 pounds, and uses molded bodywork to speed manufacturing and reduce costs. The Foundation’s production targets are 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. Those figures would require a 250-fold manufacturing increase in two years on a total funding base of about $21 million.
The company was 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, who led the Foundation’s $11 million pre-seed round; and Mike LeBlanc, a 14-year Marine Corps veteran and co-founder of Cobalt Robotics. LeBlanc provides military credibility and has said the company believes there is “a moral imperative to put these robots in war instead of soldiers.” In June 2024, CNBC reported that the Foundation had been raising funds with exaggerated claims about ties to General Motors, including claims that GM had committed to invest and placed a $300 million purchase order. GM flatly denied it. LeBlanc confirmed the denial and said he was “embarrassed” the marketing materials existed. For a company asking the Pentagon to trust its robots in combat, the credibility gap is significant.
the contracts
The $24 million in Pentagon contracts include an SBIR Phase 3 designation, which qualifies the Foundation as an approved military supplier, and specific research agreements to test humanoid robots in non-compliance scenarios. Some contracts were inherited through the acquisition of a company called Boardwalk, including a U.S. Air Force SBIR award valued at approximately $1.8 million. Eric Trump appeared on Fox Business to promote the contracts. Warren’s response was immediate: “Is the Pentagon an ATM for Trump’s children?” The political dimension is inevitable. The son of a sitting president serving as chief strategy advisor to a company that receives Department of Defense contracts raises governance questions regardless of the company’s technical merits. The contracts are real, but small. Shield AI recently raised $2 billion to scale its autonomous fighter pilotan artificial intelligence system called Hivemind that flies aircraft autonomously and has been tested in combat conditions. Anduril won a landmark ten-year, $20 billion contract with the US military for its AI-enabled Lattice platform in March. The Foundation’s $24 million is a research agreement, not a production order. The gap between a research contract and a deployed weapons system is measured in billions of dollars and years of testing.
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The Ukraine deployment adds a different kind of credibility. Two MK-1 Phantom units sent for logistics operations and reconnaissance sweeps in February represent real-world testing in a real conflict zone, and the Foundation is using feedback from the battlefield to refine the MK-2 design. But “tested in Ukraine” is not “deployed in combat.” No humanoid robot has ever fired a weapon in a conflict. The units performed support tasks. The distinction is important because the company’s marketing, its fundraising narrative, and its contracts with the Pentagon all converge on the idea of a humanoid soldier, and the technology doesn’t exist yet. NATO-backed ARX Robotics secured €31 million for its autonomous battlefield robotsground vehicles that perform logistics and reconnaissance without the complexity of bipedal locomotion. ARX Robotics is already expanding production of autonomous ground drones to 1,800 units per year in a new plant in the United Kingdom, a manufacturing reality that the Foundation’s objectives have not yet come close to.
The debate
The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of more than 250 NGOs, has been advocating for a new international legal instrument ensuring human control in the use of force since 2013. Approximately 90 states have called for such an instrument. A minority of militarized states, including the United States and Russia, have blocked its adoption. In November 2025, the First Committee of the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution with 156 states in favor and 5 against calling for negotiations on autonomous weapons. The Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems has sessions scheduled for 2026 and is expected to submit a final report to the Convention on Conventional Weapons in November. This is the last year of the GGE’s mandate, making 2026 a decisive year for the international regulation of autonomous weapons.
The Foundation’s stated policy is that human operators retain final authority over lethal decisions, a “human-in-the-loop” commitment that the Pentagon’s own Directive 3000.09 on autonomy in weapons systems requires for autonomous and semi-autonomous platforms. But the company’s LLM-driven autonomy and its stated ambition to “reduce teleoperation needs over time” are in tension with that commitment. An LLM-driven task-to-motion process that learns to operate more independently with each iteration is, by design, moving toward the autonomous capability that the international community is trying to regulate. The AI war push that made Helsing one of Europe’s most valuable tech companiesvalued at €12 billion for military AI software that coordinates swarms of drones, shows the scale of capital flowing into autonomous military systems. Ethical barriers are voluntary. Funding incentives point in one direction.
the race
China demonstrated a motion-controlled humanoid robot for military tasks at an international military cadet event in Nanjing. WuBa Intelligent Tech secured approximately $69 million for its RoboWolf quadrupeds, backed by NORINCO, the state defense conglomerate. The Pentagon added Unitree, a maker of consumer robot dogs, to its list of Chinese military companies in February 2026. War on the Rocks reported on a hidden system that turned Chinese technology companies into military suppliers. France 24 debunked viral videos purporting to show an army of Chinese humanoid robots as AI-generated fakes, but the fakes themselves reflect the arms race narrative: the perception that a country is building robot soldiers can matter as much as reality in shaping defense budgets and procurement decisions.
Russia has established Unmanned Systems Forces as a new military branch, is deploying the Kurier autonomous mortar system that loads and fires without human intervention, and is rapidly expanding its ground fleet of drones in Ukraine. Neither country has deployed humanoid robots in combat. The military robotics currently in use, on both sides of the Ukraine war and in U.S. base security and border patrol operations, are wheeled, tracked, or quadrupedal. They are successful because they are simple, cheap and expendable. A bipedal humanoid that costs $150,000 and falls over on rough terrain is none of those things. Defense technology venture capital hit a record $49.1 billion in 2025, nearly double the previous year, and Goldman Sachs projects that between 50,000 and 100,000 humanoid robots will be shipped worldwide in 2026 across all sectors. Rising Defense Stocks Signal Huge Potential for Military Tech Startups They have created a financing environment in which the discourse “humanoid robot soldiers” opens checkbooks. Whether the technology justifies the launch is a question the battlefield will answer, and the battlefield, so far, prefers wheels to legs.
