Tens of millions of customer dollars remain unaccounted for at his previous startup, fintech Synapse. But that’s not deterring Sankaet Pathak from forging full steam ahead with his new robotics venture.
Foundation is a robotics startup with a self-proclaimed mission to “create advanced humanoid robots that can operate in complex environments” to address the labor shortage. The company has already raised $11 million in pre-seed funding from Tribe Capital and “other angels,” Pathak told TechCrunch on Thursday.
Tribe co-founder and managing director Arjun Sethi is also a co-founder of Foundation, Pathak also said on Thursday. Tribe did not immediately respond to our request for comment. In June, The Information reported that Foundation had $10 million in capital commitments from Tribe Capital.
Synapse operated a service that allowed others — mainly fintechs — to embed banking services into their offerings. The San Francisco-based startup had raised a total of just over $50 million in venture capital in its lifetime, including a 2019 $33 million Series B raise led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Angela Strange.
Synapse wobbled in 2023 with layoffs and filed for Chapter 11 in April of this year. As of July, millions of consumers (mostly customers of fintechs that worked with Synapse) with nearly $160 million in deposits remained unable to access their funds. It’s not clear today just how much of those deposits remain unaccounted for.
When asked about the missing customer funds, Pathak — who founded Synapse in 2014 and served as its CEO until May — pointed me to an August 20 post in which he charges that Synapse’s former partner Evolve Bank “needs to start paying out customers and cover the deficit they created.”
He added in the post: “To that effect, I’m making all known Evolve deposit shortfalls and their causes public. Any customer, regulator, government agency, or member of the press can contact me directly for more details.”
TechCrunch has reached out to Evolve for comment. But, when Pathak or Synapse have made similar accusations previously blaming Evolve, most recently in May, Evolve has said it is not responsible and pointed the finger right back at Synapse.
Meanwhile, in a video posted on social media on Thursday, Pathak revealed more details about his new startup, Foundation.
On X, Pathak said that Foundation’s goal is to “automate GDP through AI and robotics to free people from labor jobs, allowing them to pursue their passions.”
He added: “To automate GDP, we need real-world foundation models. The challenge is the massive amount of data required for effective training, which hasn’t been collected yet. The company that deploys the largest fleet will likely win. Success won’t come from just software or hardware alone — it requires strength in both, plus the right infrastructure (more on that later). Near-term goal is to have a walking humanoid robot by year-end.”
He also, boldly, claims that Foundation’s model now “fully handles scene depth, object detection, semantic segmentation and unseen object pose estimation — exceeding what any autonomous vehicle perception stack can do.”
In general, there are mixed views on the near-term likelihood of a general-purpose humanoid robot, as TechCrunch’s hardware editor, Brian Heater, wrote in June. There are, as Pathak points out, myriad engineering problems to solve first.
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