Founder of Defunct Fintech Synapse Secures $11M for New Robotics Venture
Sankaet Pathak’s New Robotics Startup Raises $11M Despite Synapse’s Collapse
Sankaet Pathak, the founder of the failed fintech company Synapse, has raised $11 million in pre-seed funding for his new robotics startup, Foundation. Despite the fact that tens of millions of customer dollars remain unaccounted for at Synapse, Pathak is forging ahead with his new venture, which aims to “automate GDP through AI and robotics to free people from labor jobs, allowing them to pursue their passions.”
Image Credits:Ā Bryce Durbin
Foundation’s Mission and Goals
- Foundation’s mission is to “create advanced humanoid robots that can operate in complex environments” to address the labor shortage
- The company’s near-term goal is to have a walking humanoid robot by the end of 2024.
- Pathak claims that Foundation’s model now “fully handles scene depth, object detection, semantic segmentation and unseen object pose estimation ā exceeding what any autonomous vehicle perception stack can do.”
Funding and Leadership
- Foundation has raised $11 million in pre-seed funding from Tribe Capital and other angels
- Tribe co-founder and managing director Arjun Sethi is also a co-founder of Foundation
- In June, The Information reported that Foundation had $10 million in capital commitments from Tribe Capital
Synapse’s Collapse and Missing Customer Funds
- Synapse, Pathak’s previous fintech startup, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 2024
- As of July 2024, millions of consumers (mostly customers of fintechs that worked with Synapse) with nearly $160 million in deposits remained unable to access their funds
- Pathak has accused Synapse’s former partner Evolve Bank of needing “to start paying out customers and cover the deficit they created.”
Despite the challenges and unanswered questions surrounding Synapse’s collapse, Sankaet Pathak remains determined to pursue his vision of automating the global economy through his new robotics startup, Foundation.
