@FoundryRobotics || fix infrastructure with robots first || former computer vision researcher, dev advocate || angel investor
San Francisco, CA
Joined November 2017
- Tweets1.8K
- Following690
- Followers2.5K
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Isha Ghodgaonkar retweeted
Foundry Robotics CEO @adarshkulkarni reveals why the factories of the future will look more like data centers than traditional factories:
"When you come into Emeryville and see the Foundry facility, it's not like a traditional factory."
"It is somewhere between a warehouse and a data center and a factory. There’s GPUs under each work cell. There’s fiber lines coming from the ceiling. There’s a mini data center off to the side. Robotic work cells doing bimanual work, mobile robotics moving parts between them, humans collaborating with them."
"I am pretty sure I'm the only founder in Silicon Valley who's gonna brag about his screwdriver. We are building a fundamentally new fastening end effector that is highly reliable, robotics-oriented, and dramatically cheaper than what exists off the shelf."
"Everybody else is talking about how they're going to use a complex robot to hold a drill from Home Depot. Doesn't really make sense"
"By being a factory company, we get to solve these meaty engineering problems that aren't necessarily companies on their own, and roll it into the factory as the product."
@FoundryRobotics
Today, @FoundryRobotics is announcing our $100M Series A, led by @MarlinspikeVC with continued support from @khoslaventures.
Together we’re securing America's ability to defend, compete, and innovate by building critical hardware at home with our new 130,000-square-foot factory in Emeryville, California.
We’re already shipping to paying customers across energy, telecom, autonomous vehicles, and defense. The next era of American manufacturing starts here.
Time to build.
Isha Ghodgaonkar retweeted
Really need efforts like this
Today, @FoundryRobotics is announcing our $100M Series A, led by @MarlinspikeVC with continued support from @khoslaventures.
Together we’re securing America's ability to defend, compete, and innovate by building critical hardware at home with our new 130,000-square-foot factory in Emeryville, California.
We’re already shipping to paying customers across energy, telecom, autonomous vehicles, and defense. The next era of American manufacturing starts here.
Time to build.
Isha Ghodgaonkar retweeted
making software for a factory and actually making the factory is like the difference between watching the NFL and actually being in it
do not put software companies in the same category as the actual people putting literal blood sweat and tears into making parts. it’s valor stealing
The 2026 American Dynamism 50 is here: our annual list of 50 companies, from within the a16z portfolio and beyond, building for America's future.
This year's theme is Production is Deterrence. "America's ability to prevent conflict depends on what it can build, how fast it can deliver, and how long it can keep going."
A new generation of defense companies is moving from prototypes to full-scale production, and the industrial base has to keep pace. This year's list is organized around three pillars:
1. Systems: the drones, ships, missiles, aircraft, and spacecraft that deter conflict.
2. Factories: the plants, tools, and software that build them.
3. Inputs: the materials and power they're made of and run on.
Get all three right, and the impact reaches well beyond defense, to skilled jobs, revitalized communities, and the supply chains behind energy, housing, and everyday goods.
Meet all 50: a16z.news/p/ad-50-2026-produ…
Isha Ghodgaonkar retweeted
Really enjoyed speaking with @rocketalignment at @TheInformation about what we're building at @Foundryrobotics and why we believe manufacturing needs to be fundamentally rethought.
here’s the link to the article:
theinformation.com/newslette…
Isha Ghodgaonkar retweeted
Today, @FoundryRobotics is announcing our $100M Series A, led by @MarlinspikeVC with continued support from @khoslaventures.
Together we’re securing America's ability to defend, compete, and innovate by building critical hardware at home with our new 130,000-square-foot factory in Emeryville, California.
We’re already shipping to paying customers across energy, telecom, autonomous vehicles, and defense. The next era of American manufacturing starts here.
Time to build.
Isha Ghodgaonkar retweeted
If you’re reading this, you’re not ready for what’s coming in physical ai…
Isha Ghodgaonkar retweeted
Super excited to talk robots here. Looking forward to it @claudeai!
Isha Ghodgaonkar retweeted
YouTube videos are great, but also it remains a hell of an achievement to turn on 8 4k cameras for realtime processing with 4 9’s of uptime in an industrial setting
Robotics deployment is going to be everything
Isha Ghodgaonkar retweeted
This. Just this. This is why physical AI matters.
Credit to @garrett_geoff on the research.
Join @FoundryRobotics and let's fix this.
Isha Ghodgaonkar retweeted
Value creation through partial autonomy is the single most reliable strategy for building a robotics company.
Isha Ghodgaonkar retweeted
Factories are still held together by human coordination and traditional, hard-coded assembly workflows.
That’s the bottleneck.
@adarshkulkarni and @mavolpi discuss the future of autonomous manufacturing, robotics foundation models, and why scaling assembly is one of the hardest problems in the real world.
youtube.com/watch?v=TiEDulsF…
Isha Ghodgaonkar retweeted
Recently, I had the chance to speak at the @wef about the future of factories and what it will actually take to build autonomous manufacturing systems in the real world.
A lot of people imagine “lights out” factories where humans disappear entirely. That misses the point. We want factories filled with cameras that are reactive, autonomous, and intelligent.
The reality is that today’s robots still need humans to teach them — how to manipulate objects, recover from edge cases, adapt to variability, and operate in dynamic environments.
The bottleneck is no longer whether the core technology works. Robotics foundation models are improving incredibly fast.
The real challenge is scale.
How do you collect enough real-world manufacturing data?
How do you continuously improve robotic behavior across thousands of tasks?
How do you turn robotic learning into a production system, not just a demo?
That’s the problem we’re building around at Foundry Robotics.
We believe the future factory will be human-guided, AI-native, and increasingly autonomous over time — with every assembly cycle making the system smarter.
Still early, but excited for what’s coming next.
Isha Ghodgaonkar retweeted
Well I’m hiring SWEs who want to work in physical AI.
Be early to the next and final frontier of AI
The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.
Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).
Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.
Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI.
As a result,
1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb.
Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more.
2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future).
Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire"
3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed.
Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.
4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either.
No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."
I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.
Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".
Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.
Isha Ghodgaonkar retweeted
We built our first factory in 21 days.
A sledgehammer, a team, and a vision for what US manufacturing could be.
LET’S BUILD!
Isha Ghodgaonkar retweeted
Foundry Robotics opening night ⚙️
21 days before we were taking a sledgehammer to the wall and opening up the adjacent space.
Now it’s a factory floor full of investors, partners, customers, researchers, operators, and future teammates.
A lot more to come.
Isha Ghodgaonkar retweeted
Portfolio company @FoundryRobotics launching their robot factory in SF. 🦾🇺🇸
Isha Ghodgaonkar retweeted
American manufacturing is one of the hardest problems of our generation. We're here to solve it.
Today we announce $19M in seed funding, backed by @khoslaventures, @hanabicapital, @redglassvc, @ZeroShotFund, and all our other incredible investors.
AI-first. Software-defined. Just getting started. We're hiring.
