Marlinspike bets the physical-AI century will be built in Texas

Key points

Key takeaways from a theCUBE interview with Marlinspike senior associate Jude Akpunku, recorded at Capital Factory during F1 weekend in Austin (October 2026):

Thesis: dual-use defence. Marlinspike invests across defence and commercial applications, built around the conviction that "why send a man when you can send a robot" — physical AI is the next frontier and its winners will be the builders.

Texas is the arsenal. California is where you prototype, but scaling from prototype to production happens in Texas: land, a manufacturing workforce and a government that enables building; Akpunku calls the state "the Silicon Valley of energy and physical AI."

Rebuild the factories. CEO Neil Keegan's rallying cry — "rebuild the arsenal" — means an arsenal is a factory, not a stockpile; decades of offshoring gave China the repetition and skill in manufacturing, and the US must take manufacturing scale back.

Bottlenecks. The binding constraints on physical AI are skilled manufacturing workers, factory capacity and land — the places where entrepreneurs and capital now converge.

Portfolio: Foundry Robotics. Its "Anything Factory" is designed from the ground up for robots building robots — robot dogs one day, drones the next — attacking the manufacturing bottleneck; founder Adarsh previously built robotics at Ghost and Shield AI.

Portfolio: Layup. Founder Zach, an Anduril engineer who saw production bottlenecks first-hand, founded Layup to automate composite-parts factory floors with robotics and AI; Marlinspike led its round and it is now on its third facility.

Portfolio: JetZero. Marlinspike backs JetZero's blended-wing-body aircraft, projected to cut fuel costs by roughly 50%, with Air Force contracts and a planned first flight in Q4 2027.

Government as inefficient, not evil. A new generation of builders treats the government as an inefficient customer rather than an adversary, with private capital and public procurement now symbiotic and dual-use companies executing on contracts as businesses.

Read more: theCUBE on YouTube