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Highlights

How Formic Cracked Robotics Adoption by Solving the Wrong Problem

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Saman Farid, CEO and Founder of Formic, explained how his robotics company deployed to 100 factories by focusing on something most robotics companies ignore: reliability over innovation.

Most robotics founders fall in love with their technology. Saman took the opposite approach. After 15 years as a venture capitalist investing in robotics and AI, he recognized a pattern that would define Formic’s go-to-market strategy. The problem wasn’t that robotics technology didn’t work. The problem was accessibility.

The Founding Insight: Technology Wasn’t the Bottleneck

When COVID hit and grocery store shelves sat empty, Saman started asking questions. “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.”

Despite years investing in cutting-edge robotics, Saman realized the real barrier wasn’t technical capability. “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. This insight led to Formic’s entire business model: build the most accessible robotics solution, not the most advanced.

Rejecting the Traditional Robotics Playbook

Formic’s approach required rejecting nearly every assumption about how to sell and deploy robotics. “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.”

The manufacturing world operates under different constraints. If a robot goes down for even ten minutes, that customer is lost forever. “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.

The performance bar is shockingly high. Academics regularly pitch Saman on new algorithms that achieve 98% accuracy. But in manufacturing, that’s a disaster. “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,” he explains. Formic targets 99.98% performance or higher.

While competitors chase the newest sensors and algorithms, Formic deliberately chooses proven components. “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 says.

Building a Business Model Around Customer Risk

Traditional robotics sales follow a familiar pattern: sell a $100,000 robot, watch it fail, charge another $50,000 to reprogram it. Many factories have what Saman calls a “robot graveyard” where failed projects gather dust. “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,” he explains.

Formic flipped the model entirely. They offer robotics-as-a-service with try-before-you-buy and hourly payment. Most importantly, 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 most robotics companies don’t have: $250 million in debt facilities, a nationwide maintenance network, predictive monitoring tools, and productized robots that enable fast redeployment.

The Counterintuitive Sales Hire

Perhaps Formic’s most controversial GTM decision involved who they hired to sell. In robotics, conventional wisdom says you need technical salespeople. Formic discovered this was exactly wrong.

“I think one of the most important go to market decisions we’ve realized is that hiring technical salespeople is a bad idea,” Saman explains. “In robotics and automation, that’s quite controversial.”

Formic believed this for a long time too. But they realized they could supplement salespeople with technical solutions engineers. What they couldn’t afford was salespeople who didn’t understand customer pain points. “We really pivoted towards hiring much less technical sales people, but instead focus on salespeople that really understand our customers and where they’re coming from,” he says. “And it’s made a world of difference.”

This reflects Formic’s fundamental insight about their category. They’re not selling robots. They’re selling labor. The customer doesn’t want to learn about robotics technology. They want someone who understands their staffing problems.

Fundraising as a Technical Founder

Having been a VC himself, Saman brought unique perspective to fundraising for hard tech. “The more deep tech your product is, the less people there are that are gonna understand it,” he explains. Fundraising isn’t about convincing skeptics—it’s about finding investors who already get it. “If they believe it, you’ll have them quickly and early. And if they don’t, no amount of convincing is going to get them to the finish line,” Saman says.

Current Priorities and Vision

Today, Formic operates in about 100 factories across the US, making everything from matcha powder for Starbucks to nachos for Chipotle to aircraft parts. They’re focused on building customer success to capture upsell opportunities and increasing 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 longer-term vision is ambitious: become an instant, on-demand workforce for every factory in the world. This rests on a deeper conviction about manufacturing’s 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,” he explains.

The Accessibility Lesson

Formic’s success offers a template for bringing hard tech to traditional industries. The winning move wasn’t building better technology—it was making existing technology radically more accessible by rebuilding the commercial and operational model around customer needs.

Most robotics companies optimize for technical performance. Formic optimized for customer risk and reliability. Most sell hardware. Formic sells labor. Most hire technical salespeople. Formic hires people who understand customer pain. For founders building in hard tech, the lesson is clear: the technology working isn’t enough. You need to solve the accessibility problem too.