Tens of millions of dollars of client money is still unaccounted for at his previous fintech company, Synapse, but Sankaet Pathak isn't letting that stop him from forging ahead with his robotics start-up.
Foundation is a robotics startup with a self-described 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 angel investors,” Pathak told TechCrunch on Thursday.
Tribe co-founder and managing director Arjun Sethi is also a co-founder of the foundation, Pathak said Thursday. Tribe did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In June, The Information reported that the foundation had raised $10 million in capital from Tribe Capital.
Synapse operated a service that allowed other companies (mainly fintechs) to embed banking services into their own services. The San Francisco-based startup has raised a total of just over $50 million in venture capital funding, including a $33 million Series B in 2019 led by Andreessen Horowitz's Angela Strange. Synapse was mired in layoffs in 2023 and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in April of this year. As of July, millions of consumers with roughly $160 million in deposits (mostly customers of fintechs that had partnered with Synapse) remain unable to access their funds. At this time, it is unclear how many of these deposits remain missing.
Asked about customer funds going missing, Pathak, who founded Synapse in 2014 and served as CEO until May, pointed me to an Aug. 20 post in which he accused Evolve Bank, a former partner of Synapse, of “needing to start paying customers and covering the deficit they created.”
He added in the post: “As such, I am making full disclosure regarding Evolve's deposit shortfall and its causes. Customers, regulators, government agencies and the press can contact me directly for further details.”
TechCrunch has reached out to Evolve for comment, but when Pathak and Synapse made similar accusations against Evolve in May, Evolve said it wasn't responsible and fired back at Synapse.
Meanwhile, Pathak revealed more details about his new startup, “Foundation,” in a video posted on social media on Thursday.
Regarding X, Pathak said the foundation's goal is to “automate GDP through AI and robotics, freeing people from work to pursue their passions.”
He adds: “To automate GDP, we need a foundational model of the real world. The challenge is the vast amount of data needed for effective training, which has yet to be collected. The company that deploys the largest fleet of vehicles will likely win. Success will not come from software or hardware alone; it requires strengths of both, as well as the right infrastructure (more on that below). The short-term goal is to have a walking humanoid robot by the end of the year.”
He also (boldly) claims that Foundation's models are now “fully capable of scene depth, object detection, semantic segmentation, and pose estimation of unseen objects, exceeding the capabilities of any autonomous vehicle perception stack.”
In general, as TechCrunch editor Brian Heater wrote in June, there's a lot of mixed opinions about the near-term viability of general-purpose humanoid robots, and as Pathak points out, there are a myriad of engineering problems that need to be solved first.