Despite tens of millions of customer dollars still unaccounted for at his previous venture, fintech Synapse, Sankaet Pathak is moving forward with his new robotics startup.
Foundation is a robotics company focused on developing advanced humanoid robots capable of working in complex environments to help solve the labor shortage. Pathak said on Thursday that the company has already secured $11 million in pre-seed funding from Tribe Capital and other angel investors.
Arjun Sethi, co-founder and managing director of Tribe, is also a co-founder of the Foundation, according to Pathak. Tribe Capital has not yet responded to our request for comment. In June, The Information reported that Tribe Capital had committed $10 million to the Foundation.
Synapse provided a platform that allowed other companies, particularly fintechs, to integrate banking services into their offerings. The San Francisco-based startup raised over $50 million in venture capital during its lifetime, including a $33 million Series B round in 2019 led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Angela Strange.
In 2023, Synapse faced difficulties, leading to layoffs and eventually filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April. By July, millions of consumers, mostly customers of fintechs associated with Synapse, were unable to access nearly $160 million in deposits. The current status of these unaccounted funds remains unclear.
When questioned about the missing customer funds, Pathak, who founded Synapse in 2014 and served as its CEO until May, referred to an August 20 post where he claimed that Synapse’s former partner, Evolve Bank, “needs to start paying out customers and cover the deficit they created.
In his post, he stated: “In this regard, I am disclosing all known Evolve deposit shortfalls and their causes. Any customer, regulator, government agency, or member of the press can reach out to me directly for more information.”
TechCrunch has contacted Evolve for a response. However, when Pathak or Synapse have previously blamed Evolve for similar issues—most recently in May—Evolve has denied responsibility and instead held Synapse accountable.
In a video shared on social media on Thursday, Pathak provided more insights into his new startup, Foundation.
On X, Pathak explained that the Foundation aims to “automate GDP through AI and robotics, freeing people from labor jobs so they can pursue their passions.”
He further elaborated: “To automate GDP, we need real-world foundation models. The challenge lies in the vast amount of data needed for effective training, which hasn’t been collected yet. The company that deploys the largest fleet will likely come out on top. Success won’t be achieved through software or hardware alone; it requires excellence in both, along with the right infrastructure (more on that later). Our near-term goal is to have a walking humanoid robot by the end of the year.”
He also boldly claims that the Foundation’s model now “fully handles scene depth, object detection, semantic segmentation, and unseen object pose estimation—passing what any autonomous vehicle perception stack can achieve.”
Opinions are divided on the near-term feasibility of a general-purpose humanoid robot, as TechCrunch’s hardware editor, Brian Heater, noted in June. As Pathak acknowledges, numerous engineering challenges must be addressed first.
