How Formic Turns Manufacturing’s Labor Crisis Into a $10B+ Opportunity

How Formic Turns Manufacturing’s Labor Crisis Into a $10B+ Opportunity

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Saman Farid, CEO and Founder of Formic, explained how he identified one of the largest market opportunities in American manufacturing. The numbers tell a stark story: “There’s currently one and a half million unfilled jobs in manufacturing looking for people,” he explains. “10,000 baby boomers per day are retiring out of the manufacturing industry and are not being backfilled.”

This isn’t a temporary dip in hiring. It’s a structural crisis that threatens the foundation of American production capacity. And Formic isn’t selling robots to fix it. They’re selling labor itself.

The Crisis Nobody Talks About

When COVID hit and grocery store shelves sat empty, most people blamed supply chains. The real problem ran deeper. Manufacturers had capacity and demand. What they didn’t have were people.

The labor shortage predated COVID, but the pandemic accelerated it. “During COVID that number was significantly higher,” Saman notes. The demographic trend is relentless: 10,000 baby boomers retiring daily with no replacements.

This creates cascading problems. Production lines run at partial capacity. Orders go unfilled. Manufacturers turn down business. Overtime costs explode. Quality suffers.

The desperation is real. “Because there’s such a shortage of labor, even if a robot performs at 50% of the speed of a human or 50% of the quality of a human, I think there’s still a lot of people that would adopt robots,” Saman explains. When manufacturers accept technology performing at half human level, the pain is acute.

Why This Creates a $10B+ Opportunity

Most entrepreneurs count potential customers. Saman calculated the gap between what manufacturing needs and what it has.

“I realized that this was a, you know, a $10 billion or bigger opportunity,” he says. This isn’t based on robotics market size. It’s based on the cost of unfilled labor across American manufacturing.

The math: 1.5 million unfilled positions at modest wages represents tens of billions in lost productivity annually. Factor in downstream effects and the total economic impact is massive.

But here’s what makes this category-defining: the problem is upstream. “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.

Solve manufacturing’s labor crisis, and you enable every industry that depends on manufactured goods—essentially every industry.

The Category Definition Insight

Most robotics companies position as selling robotics—better, faster, smarter robots. This frames them as technology vendors competing on specs.

Formic made a different choice. They don’t sell robots. They sell labor.

This reframing changes everything. A VP of Operations doesn’t wake up thinking “I need robotics.” They’re thinking “I have twelve unfilled positions and production is suffering.”

When Formic enters that conversation, they’re not asking customers to care about robotics. They’re offering to fill empty headcount. The robot is implementation detail. The product is labor capacity.

This positioning explains why everything is structured like hiring workers: hourly payment, try-before-you-buy, guaranteed performance. They’re not mimicking labor—they’re competing with labor as an alternative workforce solution.

The Desperation Advantage

Severe market pain creates unusual opportunity. “The labor shortages, it’s hard for people to grasp, if they don’t spend time in manufacturing, how dire the labor shortage is today,” Saman notes. This desperation lowers adoption barriers that would normally block new technology.

Manufacturers who’ve never considered automation are suddenly willing. Facilities that rejected robotics vendors are calling back. Robot graveyards full of failed deployments matter less when the alternative is shutting down production.

This creates a window for category-defining companies. When pain reaches crisis levels, the market accepts solutions that wouldn’t gain traction in normal conditions. The key is recognizing when market pain crosses from “problem” to “crisis.”

Building for the Crisis

Recognizing opportunity differs from capitalizing on it. Formic built capabilities for desperate customers who’d been burned before.

The guarantee addresses skepticism. Robotics-as-a-service eliminates capital barriers. 99.98% reliability ensures robots actually replace labor. Nationwide maintenance prevents downtime.

“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,” Saman explains. The “missing step” was accessibility.

The Current State

Today, Formic operates in about 100 factories making everything from Starbucks matcha powder to aircraft parts. “We are able to provide robots to a whole class of customers that previously never thought they would adopt robotics,” Saman says.

These aren’t sophisticated manufacturers with robotics capabilities. They’re facilities in crisis needing labor solutions, not technology experiments.

The priorities reflect the opportunity’s scale: building customer success to capture upsell, and increasing awareness because “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 Lesson for Founders

Formic’s story reveals principles for building category-defining opportunities:

Look for structural crises, not temporary problems. The labor shortage is demographic—10,000 daily retirements don’t stop.

Position as the solution to customer pain, not as your technology. Formic sells labor, not robotics.

Understand when pain crosses from problem to crisis. Crisis-level pain changes adoption dynamics.

Build for accessibility when technology exists but isn’t usable. The robotics technology worked. Making it accessible was the gap.

Recognize upstream opportunities. Solving manufacturing’s crisis enables every industry manufacturing supports.

The Vision Ahead

Saman’s vision extends beyond 100 factories. “We want them to be able to call us,” he says, describing a future where manufacturers access robotics capacity as easily as making a phone call—instant, on-demand workforce for every factory in the world.

This vision becomes viable when you’re solving a $10B+ crisis rather than selling a technology. The market pull is strong enough to support massive scale. The pain is urgent enough to drive rapid adoption. The opportunity is large enough to build a category-defining company.

As Saman discovered: the biggest opportunities emerge not from inventing new technology, but from making necessary technology accessible to markets in crisis.