Tens of millions of dollars of customer debt remains unaccounted for at his previous fintech startup Synapse. But that doesn’t stop Sankaet Pathak from throwing himself into his new robotics adventure.
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 angel investors,” Pathak told TechCrunch on Thursday.
Tribe co-founder and CEO Arjun Sethi is also a co-founder of the foundation, Pathak also said Thursday. Tribe did not immediately respond to our request for comment. In June, The Information reported that the Foundation had received capital commitments of $10 million from Tribe Capital.
Synapse operated a service that allowed other companies, mostly fintechs, to integrate banking services into their offerings. The San Francisco-based startup had raised a total of just over $50 million in venture capital over its lifetime, including a funding round in 2019 $33 million Series B fundraising directed by Angela Strange of Andreessen Horowitz.
Synapse faltered in 2023 with layoffs And filed for chapter 11 in April of this year. In July, millions of consumers (mostly fintech clients who worked with Synapse) with nearly $160 million in deposits remained unable to access their fundsIt is not yet clear how much of these deposits were not accounted for.
Asked about the missing customer funds, Pathak — who founded Synapse in 2014 and served as its CEO until May — told me that Article from August 20 in which he accuses Synapse’s former partner, Evolve Bank, “of having to start paying its customers and covering the deficit they created.”
He added in the message: “To this end, I am making public all known shortfalls in Evolve’s deposits and their causes. Any customer, regulator, government agency or member of the press may contact me directly for further details.”
TechCrunch has reached out to Evolve for comment. But when Pathak or Synapse made similar accusations, He had previously blamed Evolve, most recently in MayEvolve said it was not responsible and pointed the finger 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 the Foundation’s goal is to “automate GDP through AI and robotics to free people from gig jobs, allowing them to pursue their passions.”
He added: “To automate GDP, we need real-world baseline models. The challenge is the massive amount of data needed for effective training, which has not yet been collected. The company that deploys the largest fleet will likely win. Success will not come from software or hardware alone. You will need to be strong in both areas, as well as the right infrastructure (more on that later). The short-term goal is to have a walking humanoid robot by the end of the year.”
He also boldly claims that Foundation’s model “now fully handles scene depth, object detection, semantic segmentation, and pose estimation of unseen objects, surpassing what any autonomous vehicle perception stack can do.”
In general, there are mixed opinions on the near-term likelihood of a general-purpose humanoid robot, as TechCrunch editor Brian Heater wrote in June. There are, as Pathak points out, myriad engineering problems to solve first.
Want more fintech news delivered to your inbox? Sign up for TechCrunch Fintech here.
Have a tip you’d like to share? Email me at maryann@techcrunch.com or message me on Signal at 408.204.3036. You can also message the entire TechCrunch team at tips@techcrunch.com. For more secure communications, Click here to contact uswhich includes SecureDrop (instructions here) and links to encrypted messaging apps.