Jakob Knudsen

Jakob Knudsen
Occupation	Entrepreneur, founder
Known for	Founder of Foundation Industries

Jakob Knudsen is an American entrepreneur and the founder of Foundation Industries, a domestic manufacturing company that supplies critical components to hard technology companies. The company participates in Y Combinator's P25 batch and is based in Redwood City, California.

Career

Knudsen founded Foundation Industries to address what he describes as a longstanding decline in domestic production velocity for hardware companies. The company positions itself as a manufacturing partner for frontier hardware companies, offering high-mix, low-volume CNC machining with turnaround times as short as two days.

Foundation Industries operates a portal-based workflow in which approved companies can upload designs, set specifications, submit parts for quoting, manage payment, and track production through a single platform. The company works with materials including 6061 T6 aluminum and 316 stainless steel, among others. Its stated mission is to rebuild American manufacturing capacity by automating the cognitive and administrative layers—quoting, programming, scheduling, and coordination—that have historically slowed low-volume domestic production.

According to the company's description on Y Combinator's Work at a Startup platform, Foundation Industries argues that new software tools now make it possible to collapse weeks of manufacturing overhead into days, rendering fast, flexible domestic production economically competitive for the first time in decades. The company's stated goal is to help hard-tech teams prototype faster, launch sooner, and manufacture more within the United States.

As of its Y Combinator listing, Foundation Industries had a team of three people and was hiring for a founding machinist role based in Redwood City, California, with compensation listed at $100,000–$175,000 in salary and 1.00%–1.50% equity.