Foothill Ventures

Foothill Ventures is a frontier-tech seed and Series A fund, founded in 2017 in Los Altos by the former Tsingyuan team, with an explicit agentic-AI, physical-AI, and compute-infrastructure focus. That thesis maps directly onto the Physical AI universe's robotics, autonomy, and industrial-automation layers. In the PXS map, Foothill enters through three sourced, direct relationships: Amperesand (the solid-state power infrastructure company), Jacobi Robotics, and Metalenz. Each is a mapped Physical AI or enabling-technology company, connected by verified financing records. The research map records attributed financing relationships, not a complete portfolio or a live ownership register, and only direct, sourced relationships to existing mapped companies are captured. Foothill is most useful as a signal of which early-stage capital networks are backing the physical-AI and compute-infrastructure build-out — the seed-stage edge of the machine's Physical AI research. Founded in 2017 by the former Tsingyuan team out of Los Altos, Foothill is a seed-stage expression of the Physical AI build-out, and its three mapped positions — power infrastructure, robotics, and optics — deliberately span the enabling layers beneath the robot itself rather than concentrating on a single theme.