The Story of Formic: Building the World’s First On-Demand Robot Workforce

The Story of Formic: Building the World’s First On-Demand Robot Workforce

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Saman Farid, CEO and Founder of Formic, shared the story of how empty grocery store shelves during COVID led him to abandon venture capital and build a robotics company now deployed across 100 US factories.

The Moment Everything Changed

For 15 years, Saman invested in robotics and AI as a venture capitalist. He watched brilliant technology get built and promising startups struggle to scale. He maintained what he calls “a little bit naively and naively optimistically” the belief that once robotics technology worked, adoption would naturally follow.

Then COVID hit. Grocery stores had empty shelves. Saman started spending time with manufacturers of basic consumer products. What he discovered wasn’t a technology problem. It was a human problem.

“There’s currently one and a half million unfilled jobs in manufacturing looking for people,” he explains. “During COVID that number was significantly higher, and 10,000 baby boomers per day are retiring out of the manufacturing industry and are not being backfilled.”

This crystallized something he’d been observing for years. “Despite the fact that the robotics technology works, there’s still this missing step in terms of getting it to a place where it’s useful for the people who need it the most,” he says. The problem wasn’t making better robots. It was making robots accessible.

The Impossible Timing

By every rational measure, October 2020 was the worst time to start a company. The world was locked down and Saman was about to become a first-time father. “Not only was it kind of smack in the middle of COVID when there was a lot of uncertainty in the world, I was actually also expecting my first child right around then,” he recalls. “And I think I had my first child two months after we started the company.”

But he’d identified a $10 billion or bigger opportunity. “If I didn’t jump on it now, I would regret it for the rest of my life,” he says.

There was something else driving him. “When you’re a builder, there’s an itch that can never get scratched,” Saman explains. Being a VC let him learn from entrepreneurs, but it wasn’t the same as building. “Being a VC is a job I can do when I’m 60. Until then, I should really spend all the energy that I have building stuff.”

So he made the leap. He pulled together early team members, secured initial funding, and Formic was born.

The Hard Lessons

The early days forced Formic to confront assumptions nobody in robotics questioned. “In software, there’s this mentality that you can kind of iterate really quickly. In academia, there’s this mentality that the coolest technology wins,” Saman explains. “I think in the real world, what we found is neither of those are true.”

Factories don’t tolerate iteration. If a robot goes down for ten minutes, you’ve lost that customer. “With robotics, you don’t really get the chance to iterate quickly once you deploy something, if it doesn’t work, then you’ve just lost that customer,” Saman says.

This forced a fundamental choice. Most robotics companies chase cutting-edge technology. Formic would do the opposite. “Let’s not necessarily go and find the newest technology out there for every kind of robot in the world. Let’s go find the things that are the most reliable and choose the path that leads to the highest robustness for our customers,” Saman explains.

The performance bar was brutal. Academics would pitch 98% accuracy algorithms. But Saman ran the math: “If you’re doing, let’s say, 10,000 operations per day and you’re only 98% accurate, that means you’re dropping hundreds of parts per day, making hundreds of mistakes per day, which is just completely unacceptable in a manufacturing environment.” Formic needed 99.98% or higher.

Rebuilding the Business Model

The technical challenge was only half the problem. Formic had to overcome decades of failed robotics deployments that burned manufacturers. Many factories had robot graveyards—rooms where expensive equipment gathered dust after failing to deliver.

“Because there’s all these failures, people are not adopting new technology, and as a result, we’re ending with much lower productivity in our factories,” Saman explains.

Formic flipped everything. Robots as a service. Try before you buy. Pay hourly like labor. And most critically, they guarantee performance. “We are providing the only solution out there that actually guarantees performance and guarantees throughput,” Saman says. “That means that we are able to provide robots to a whole class of customers that previously never thought they would adopt robotics.”

Making this work required building capabilities beyond robotics: $250 million in debt facilities, a nationwide maintenance network, predictive monitoring systems, and productized robots for fast redeployment.

The Current Reality

Today, Formic operates in about 100 factories across America. Their robots make matcha powder for Starbucks, nachos for Chipotle, metal parts for aircraft, and plastic components for drilling equipment. “We monitor all of our robots that are in the field on a minute by minute basis, and we get to see what their cycle time is and what the errors are,” Saman says.

The immediate focus is building customer success to capture upsell opportunities. Once manufacturers see robots working reliably, they come back for more. They’re also investing in market awareness. “Once people know about us and what we do and how we do it, we have a very high conversion rate across the board,” Saman explains.

The Vision

Saman’s ambition extends beyond 100 factories. He wants Formic to become an instant, on-demand workforce available to every factory in the world. “We want them to be able to call us,” he says.

This rests on a conviction about manufacturing’s fundamental importance. “Manufacturing is upstream of every other industry, whether it’s agriculture, whether it’s construction, whether it’s the military, whether it’s healthcare, none of those industries exist if you can’t build the parts and components that they all need,” Saman explains.

If Formic succeeds at making robotics truly accessible, they don’t just build a successful company. They help rebuild American manufacturing capacity and solve the labor crisis threatening factory output nationwide.

It’s the kind of infrastructure-level impact that’s rare in startups. And it’s exactly what Saman left venture capital to build. The empty grocery store shelves of 2020 revealed a crisis. Formic is building the solution—one factory at a time.