Today is a special day for robots and manufacturers in America. I’m proud to announce that Formic has secured $27.4M in additional funding led by Blackhorn Ventures, which will accelerate and scale our mission of putting more robots to work in American factories. This brings our total Series A funding to $53.9M.
Formic was founded with a vision to create a world of abundance with robots as our tireless allies. Ever since watching "The Jetsons" and "Wall-E" as a kid, I’ve been looking forward to the proliferation of robots to ease our lives. But, everything has largely remained painstakingly manual. Even worse, much of today's work is literally backbreaking. Our first step to changing the current reality is fortifying American manufacturing.
Manufacturing is the backbone of America. Our customers produce the essentials that sustain our daily lives and provide the jobs that invigorate our country and economy. They are hardworking, resilient, intelligent, adaptable, and enduring. It's an honor to contribute to their growth and success. Unfortunately, The next decade of American manufacturing will be defined by an existential labor challenge. Over 500,000 manufacturing positions are unfilled today, and the National Association of Manufacturing predicts this gap could widen to 2.1 million by 2030, costing the U.S. economy $1 trillion in that year alone. Currently, more than a quarter of the manufacturing workforce is nearing retirement.
A few weeks ago, I visited a factory where workers stacked 40 lb boxes 8 feet high to meet increasing demand. The crew had perfected the skill of launching these boxes high above their heads for a perfect landing every time. Unfortunately, this impressive feat was likely damaging their backs and shoulders as they pushed to meet production demands. This grueling work continued 24/7. As you can imagine, even the most hardworking people struggled to keep that up all day, every day.
It is critical to the vitality of our nation that we overcome labor challenges to maintain and improve our manufacturing base. More automation in more factories is a critical piece to bolstering manufacturing in the United States and creating lasting resiliency in our supply chain.
So What Have We Been Up To?
Formic set out to build the fastest, easiest way for a factory to adopt robots. We believe we now have the fastest, easiest, and lowest risk way for factories to succeed with automation - with no upfront investment required. This is an accomplishment we’re incredibly proud of.
To build a subscription offering that is equal parts flexible, affordable, and customer-friendly, we had to rebuild the traditional process of deploying a robot from the ground up. Our pay-for-productivity model ensures that our success is completely tied to the success of our customers, and that our customers only pay for the thing that matters – productivity.
We had to innovate extensively in many directions at the same time. We developed software to expedite site evaluation, deployment processes, and fleet management. We standardized equipment to speed deployment and deliver repeatable operational success time and time again. We developed a program to let manufacturers test equipment in their facilities with no long term obligations. We built an innovative asset financing back-office to make equipment available to everyone. We hired an experienced team of boots-on-the-ground operators across the nation to install and maintain our fleet of robotic systems in our customers’ facilities across the nation.
Each of these accomplishments was immensely difficult in its own right, but the combined impact of our innovation in all these areas has allowed us to set the standard for Robots-as-a-Service and eliminate the financial and operational barriers that have historically impeded swift adoption of automation in the United States. And the manufacturers are taking advantage of the opportunity. We have powered more than 100,000 hours of robotic productivity for American factories, contributing to the production of more than 1.2 billion American made products.
About 75% of our customers are working with us to deploy their very first robotic automation system. Manufacturers like Cameron’s Coffee, Mi Rancho, Compact Industries, and many more have leveraged Robots-as-a-Service to introduce automation into their facilities and rapidly grow their usage to multiple systems within the same year. By enabling this transformative step in their businesses and successfully delivering increases in productivity, safety, and quality on their production lines, it is no surprise that 97% of customers have renewed our agreements to continue our successful partnership.
So What’s Next For Formic?
While we have a long way to go to achieve our goal of bringing automation to enable every US manufacturing facility, we are extremely proud of what we’ve accomplished so far. As Formic grows, we’re dedicated to improving our offerings for our current focus segments of CPG packaging and manufacturing, and strengthening our portfolio of offerings for metal fabrication and plastic injection molding customers.
We’re redoubling efforts to improve our AI-powered software products for site evaluation (Formic FAST), robot deployment (Formic Core), and system operations (Formic Ant + Colony), widening our geographic footprint, strengthening our relationships with key hardware suppliers, and providing world-class operational support for all of our deployments.
We’re hiring and growing our sales team, engineering team, deployment team, and field operations teams — if you or anyone you know is passionate about rebuilding the American industrial base and building a world full of robots, check out our job board.
With this new funding, we're poised to solve new, harder problems, deliver a broader range of solutions to drive manufacturing success in the USA, and drastically scale up the number of robots we have in the world.
We couldn't have reached this milestone without the unwavering support of our team, partners, customers, and investors. Thank you for believing in our vision and joining us on this exciting journey. Here's to a future where robots and humans work together to build a world of abundance.