Formic, a Chicago company that rents robots to American factories, has raised $50M to build machines that do more than one job.
Axios first reported the round on Thursday, after chief executive Saman Farid spoke to Natalie Breymeyer. Today, Formic's robots are built for specific tasks. The new money will help the company move toward general-purpose machines, meaning robots that can be put to work on several kinds of factory work instead of one.
The pivot matters because of how Formic sells. Renting, rather than selling, puts the robot on a monthly bill instead of a capital budget. That is the part of the story we can state with confidence. What follows is our own analysis.
A single-task robot has a built-in limit: when the job disappears, so does the reason to keep the machine. A robot that can move between tasks is easier to keep busy. In a rental business, we would expect that to shift risk toward the vendor, which owns the hardware and needs it earning. Nothing in the reporting describes Formic's contracts or pricing, so treat that as inference, not disclosed fact.
The ambition also puts Formic in a crowded and difficult field. Industrial robots have long been programmed for one repetitive job, such as welding or stacking boxes, and startups building humanoid robots, including Figure and Agility Robotics, are chasing the more flexible version. The harder question for Formic is how much of a factory floor one machine can cover before a person has to step in.