Published 2026-10-29 · Cyclone Bolt

Foundry Robotics, an Emeryville, California company that builds and operates robotic assembly factories, said on October 28, 2026 that it has raised an oversubscribed $100 million Series A round led by Marlinspike Partners, according to the company's announcement issued through Business Wire. The company said the money will go toward building out its Emeryville facility, moving AI models into real-world manufacturing, and growing its robotics research, engineering and factory operations teams.

Early backers Khosla Ventures and Red Glass Ventures took part in the round, the release said, along with new investors SE Ventures, Wing VC and Axiom Ventures and existing investors Hanabi and Zero Shot Fund.

What Foundry announced

Foundry describes its business as building and operating autonomous factories for assembly, offered as manufacturing-as-a-service to defense and commercial customers. The release said the company has expanded its manufacturing footprint twentyfold, to a 130,000-square-foot facility in Emeryville. The applications it listed include drones, autonomous vehicle subassemblies, wire harnesses, underwater vehicles, telecom and data center infrastructure, ground robots, rugged computers, robot compute boxes and satellites.

The AI Insider reported on October 29, 2026 that the company calls the Emeryville site the first autonomous factory in the United States focused on assembly, with 20 times the capacity it had before. The outlet also reported that Foundry owns and operates its production facilities rather than selling automation equipment, and that it points to unmanned systems, telecommunications and data center infrastructure, and robotics and aerospace hardware as target markets.

Under the model described in the release, Foundry owns and runs the factory and takes a customer's product from design to production in weeks, without the customer paying for a new production line or retooling. The company's AI models run in grids of robotic cells coordinated by software it calls FoundryOS, which The AI Insider described as connecting robots, factory operations and cloud software. The company says every production run feeds back into the models. The release contrasts this with conventional assembly lines, which it says are built around a single product, take months to deploy and are costly to reconfigure.

"Our mission is to revitalize U.S. manufacturing and create more capacity to build and scale critical product assembly," said Adarsh Kulkarni, Foundry's founder and CEO, in the release.

The defense angle

The release included a statement from Duane Fotheringham, president of HII Unmanned Systems, who said that "production capacity is a national constraint on getting unmanned systems to the fleet" and described Foundry's approach as the kind of capability the defense industrial base needs. The release did not name any Foundry customer or contract.

According to the release, Foundry was founded in 2026. Kulkarni was previously Scale AI's first head of robotics and an early employee at Ghost Robotics, and co-founder Emmanuel Lamacchia was formerly program manager for the Tesla Model Y program. The release said the leadership team also includes former Tesla software leader Anup Karmakar and Marine Corps, Army and Air Force veterans who worked at Raytheon and Northrop Grumman.

What automated assembly means for bolting and fastener supply

Final assembly is where fasteners are consumed. The products Foundry lists, from drone airframes and satellite subassemblies to rugged computers and data center equipment, are held together with cap screws, machine screws, nuts, washers, studs and machined hardware, along with brackets and inserts that are themselves machined parts. A plant that assembles many different products on shared robotic cells does not change what those products are made of; it changes how the parts arrive and how they are handled.

Automated fastening is typically less forgiving than hand assembly. Feeders, grippers and torque-controlled drivers are set up around a specific part geometry, so buyers supplying automated lines commonly ask for tighter control of head dimensions, thread fit, length and surface finish, and for consistency from lot to lot. Drawings for these parts often call out thread standards and plating specifications in detail, and purchase orders commonly require a certificate of conformance with each shipment. Part number consolidation is also common, because every additional fastener variant is another feeder and another changeover.

For the defense and aerospace products on Foundry's list, the documentation requirements stack on top of that. Specifications for aerospace and defense hardware commonly cite military and aerospace fastener standards, require lot traceability back to the mill heat, and invoke DFARS specialty metals clauses that govern where the steel, titanium or nickel alloy in a fastener was melted. Buyers in these programs generally look for suppliers whose quality systems are certified to AS9100 or AS9120 and ask for mill test reports with each lot. Which standards, materials and documents apply to any given part comes from the customer's engineer and the program's contract flow-downs.

The business model also matters for supply planning. A factory that moves between a drone subassembly and a satellite component changes its fastener mix frequently and in small quantities, which is where short runs and custom machined components tend to be needed quickly. And a 130,000-square-foot facility fit-out is itself a construction job: robotic cells, conveyors, racking and electrical gear are anchored to the slab and bolted to their frames, which typically means anchor bolts, hex bolts, heavy hex nuts and washers specified by the project engineer.

Where Cyclone Bolt fits

Cyclone Bolt is a Houston, Texas manufacturer of fasteners, threaded products and custom machined components, established in 2016. Its quality certifications are AS9100D, AS9120B, ISO 9001:2015, API Spec Q1, API 20E and API 20F, and it supplies DFARS-compliant material. Cyclone's CAGE code is 8HH90. Cyclone has no connection to Foundry Robotics, its investors or the companies quoted in the release; the announcement is covered here as an example of how AI-driven automation is being applied to U.S. assembly work. Cyclone welcomes aerospace and defense conversations of any size, from large contracts to small contracts and one-off projects.

If you are sourcing hex bolts, cap screws, studs, heavy hex nuts or machined components for a defense program or an automated production line, request a quote from Cyclone Bolt.

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