Foundation Future Industries’ military claims just got a lot bigger, with the robotics startup boasting about tens of millions of dollars in Pentagon funding and saying that its humanoids have already seen combat.
In a new pitch deck, previously discoverable online, the San Francisco company claims more than $73 million in contracts tied to the US Navy, Air Force, and Army. That’s more than 3x more than Foundation’s unsubstantiated $24 million contract claim that has been widely reported across the media.
Note: Passages and screenshots from the deck have been removed after a legal demand from Foundation. The deck was found through an organic search.
There are a lot of reasons to take the claims with a huge grain of salt.
Foundation has leaned heavily into the robot soldier narrative since it emerged from stealth in early 2025. While leading humanoid companies like Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, and Unitree Robotics have pledged to never support lethal use cases, Foundation was openly eager to deploy its machines onto the battlefield.
Sankaet Pathak founded the robotics firm in 2024 with venture capitalist Arjun Sethi and Mike LeBlanc, a former US Marines officer and co-founder of Cobalt Robotics. They launched Foundation with around $11 million in pre-seed funding, part of which went toward acquiring Boardwalk Robotics, a spinout of Florida’s Institute of Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC). That’s who built the humanoid platform, named Alex, that Foundation is building on today.
Pathak, who serves as Foundation’s CEO, dove right into the humanoid sector months after his fintech startup Synapse went bankrupt. The banking-as-a-service middleware company reportedly became the subject of a federal grand jury investigation after its collapse left tens of millions of dollars in customer funds unaccounted for.
While raising capital for the humanoid venture, the founding team came under fire for exaggerating its relationship with General Motors. CNBC reported that a document sent to investors boasted about a potential $300 million deal that the automaker called “fabricated.” Co-founder LeBlanc said at the time he was “embarrassed” that the marketing materials overstated Foundation’s GM ties.
Despite the baggage, Pathak has managed to position himself as one of the perceived leaders in the US humanoid robotics scene. Since the pivot, he’s made a series of bold claims that the media has largely repeated without scrutiny.
Foundation’s flagship humanoid, the Phantom MK1, debuted at SF’s Temple Nightclub as the newly inaugurated Trump Administration vowed to fast-track autonomous tech into defense. Despite showing its robots doing little more than logistics work, Foundation quickly became known as America’s killer robot company. At one point, it even named its AI system Skynet, after the problematic defense network in The Terminator series, before changing it to Cortex.
Stories about Foundation’s military work grew increasingly larger than life after Eric Trump joined the startup as a chief advisor in early 2026. That’s when Foundation claimed that it delivered two of its robots to Ukraine for evaluation in wartime conditions. But there’s no proof beyond Foundation’s word.
Journalist Craig S. Smith, who hosts a podcast called Eye on AI, says he traveled to Kyiv in January 2026 expecting to see the robots delivered to the Ukrainian military. However, they were stopped at the Poland border. Regardless, major media outlets like TIME and CNBC soon reported that Foundation’s humanoids were in Ukraine. News aggregators and social media posts took things further, suggesting they were actively fighting.
When Smith tried to verify the story, he said LeBlanc told him they were shown to Brave1, the Ukrainian military’s organization that assesses next-gen technologies, in February. But Brave1 CEO Andrii Hrytseniuk told him that never happened. When pressed, LeBlanc said he “didn’t mean to suggest that we actually delivered a demo to Brave1” and that it was actually a “closed pilot demonstration” facilitated by them. He wouldn’t say whether it was in Ukraine or Poland.
“Over several weeks, I asked Foundation basic questions on what date and at which crossing the robots entered Ukraine which Ukrainian officials or units hosted the demonstration, and what documentation exists of the tests the company says were backed by the US government,” Smith said on his podcast. “They would not answer any of these questions.”
He said Pathak insisted in an email that “the team did go to Ukraine and the robots did demos there” and that Foundation was in “late-stage conversations with them on larger contracts.” Foundation has since declined to comment further, he said, citing “ongoing talks to put Phantoms on the Ukranian battlefield.”
Smith said he grew more skeptical about Foundation when he visited its lab in April 2026. The robotics firm had set a target of manufacturing 10,000 humanoids by the end of 2026, but Smith described it as “a research lab, not a factory,” that was producing about one robot per day.
“The whole time I kept trying to square what I saw with the company’s pitch: machines that would cross rough terrain in a warzone and carry weapons,” he said. “I just couldn’t square it.”
The Brave1 connection is plausible in principle because it’s essentially an innovation hub that exists to connect deep tech companies with Ukrainian military needs. Since it launched in 2023, it’s awarded more than 1,000 grants totaling $139 million. Brave1 says its network includes over 2,500 companies, including more than 500 drone makers, 200 ground robot firms, and 500 defense intelligence companies. Brave1 also recently announced a grant program specifically for humanoids.
Another potential pathway could be former Defense Minister Mykhailo Federov’s newly announced Army of Robots program. The ex-military official, controversially dismissed by Volodymyr Zelenskyy over the summer, announced the private defense tech initiative with an AI-generated video on social media. He describes the Army of Robots as an ecosystem that will invest in defense tech firms, aiming to eventually replace frontline soldiers with humanoids.
In April, now former Fox News host Maria Bartiromo gave Pathak and Eric Trump a national platform to promote Foundation’s military ambitions. She kicked off the segment by breaking the news that Foundation won a $24 million contract from the Pentagon to train its humanoids alongside US Marines. The unsupported claim spread like wildfire across mainstream media outlets like The Washington Post, NBC News, and most recently, The Wall Street Journal.
Since defense contracts are a matter of public record, it would be easy to verify if true, but government contract databases only show awards Foundation inherited through Boardwalk. And they’re worth nowhere near $24 million or even $10 million. They include $1.88 million from USAF, about $1.3 million from the Army, and a $156,000 NASA award.
One of the few outlets to question Foundation’s claims has been WIRED. When reporter Will Knight asked Foundation to clarify the discrepancy, the company pointed to two contracts won by Boardwalk before the acquisition and three projects conducted by IHMC. WIRED concluded that Foundation had not independently secured any military contracts and that the $24 million figure was “fuzzy.”
Foundation has also claimed more than $100 million in contracted annual recurring revenue (CARR) from unnamed automotive and industrial customers. If true, that would make it one of the world’s leaders in the humanoid market.
The company plans to open a new factory to scale production of its next-generation Phantom MK2 humanoids, priced around $100,000 per year under a Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) model. Foundation justifies the cost by insisting that each robot can handle three shifts. Phantom’s battery life is reported as 6 hours, but the company has said the MK1 has demonstrated the ability to work around the clock while tethered to a power source.
Foundation says it’s also working toward tasks requiring humanlike dexterous manipulation as former Tesla Optimus engineer Andrea Esposito leads the design of its tendon-driven five-fingered hand.
Unlike most perceived leaders in the humanoid race, Foundation has disclosed very little about its funding. So, it remains unclear whether it has the capital needed for such an aggressive ramp up. If the company achieves even half of its stated goals, it would be ahead of likely all of its competitors in the West and even most Chinese firms.