Misa Ilkhechi has seen his share of idle welding robots. With stints in sales and engineering at companies like Bosch and, most recently, Universal Robots, Ilkhechi would visit various metal fabrication facilities, see a busy welding department, and yet also see a robot welding cell gathering dust.
Sometimes the company couldn’t find time to train someone to run it. Other times, a large project ended and the shop just couldn’t find another use for the automation. And by the time the fab shop did find another use, the robot was just too old to be competitive.
Ilkhechi saw this problem and, together with Saman Farid, decided to tackle it by launching a Chicago-based company called Formic Technologies in September 2020. Read more>