This week, we raised $26.5 Million in our Series A financing led by Lux Capital. I’m honored to partner with the Lux team and have Shahin Farschi join me on our board of directors. Lux is one of the leading deep technology investment funds, and has excelled for years at turning “sci-fi into sci-fact”. Lux is joined in this round by Initialized Ventures, Correlation Ventures, Lorimer Ventures, One Planet VC as well as personal investments from a group of industry executives that we’re proud to call partners.
This financing values Formic at over $100 Million only 15 months after founding. We have also secured more than $100 Million of debt capital to fund equipment purchases. We are extremely proud to have some of the best investors in the world in our corner as we continue to grow. I’m incredibly proud of the team we’ve built, the technology we’ve delivered, and am more excited than ever about the path that lays ahead.
American manufacturers have struggled during the pandemic with chronic labor shortages, supply chain issues, and global price competition. Manufacturers reported 814,000 job openings in May 2021 alone, roughly double the year before (WSJ). Everytime we walk through a factory, we hear stories about how much lost production they have because of lack of access to labor, or how often their equipment and plant sits idle (often more than 60% of the total hours in a year). The low margins American manufacturers face, when coupled with the 1.5 Million unfilled jobs in manufacturing, make this a dire situation.
For those that don’t already know us: Formic makes it easy for any factory to automate, without needing to become experts in robotics or investing millions of capital in purchasing their own robots. We reduce the complexity, cost, and time-to-value of automation systems by owning, programming, installing and maintaining the robots at our own cost. Customers pay nothing until the system is fully operational on their factory floor, and once it’s there, they only pay to use our robots by-the-hour, only when they’re running, and only when they hit the performance we promise.
This makes automating risk-free for factories, removes the need for upfront investment, removes the need for complexity or internal resources, and just delivers what factories actually need the most – outcomes now.
This new capital will help us accelerate and scale our core mission: making the process of automating easy and cost-effective. We are tripling the team, expanding to new regions, working with more partners, and building a world-class service and maintenance organization.
However, the newly raised capital means nothing unless it delivers results to the customers who trust us with their business. Two early customers, Polar Manufacturing and Georgia Nut, have a combined 180 years in business, and our model empowered them to automate for the very first time in their company’s histories. Our systems started saving them money on day 1, and we expect to save them a combined $150,000 a year on just the first deployed robots. In fact, more than a third of our existing customers who automated with Formic have asked for more robots.
We’ve been incredibly busy this last year building out our company and we’re just getting started. We will use these funds to scale up our teams across every area of the business, with a particular focus on sales, engineering, finance, and marketing. We’ll be posting our open roles on this site. Come build with us!
We also wanted to say a big heartfelt thank you to our employees, investors, industry partners, and most importantly, to our customers. Thank you for placing your faith in us. We look forward to continuing to work with all of you for years to come.
- Saman