Formic

Formic's Founder & CEO Saman Farid on a habit he thinks matters more than people realize: every minute spent consuming is a minute not spent creating. Building robots that actually work on the plant floor takes creative problem-solving, not just knowledge. School trains most of us to consume and critique, not to build. Saman's take: you have to practice creating on purpose, or that muscle doesn't develop.

Formic's Saman Farid is joining the "Robots Get Real: Real World Deployments in Manufacturing Robots" panel at the IMTS Investor & Innovation Summit, on Tuesday, September 15, in Chicago. He's speaking alongside Julian Counihan (Schematic Ventures), Edward Mehr (Machina Labs), Andrew Lonsberry (Path Robotics), and Ariyan Kabir (GrayMatter Robotics). They'll discuss what it actually takes to run robots in real factories, from one cell to 100+. Space is limited. Register here: https://lnkd.in/efdTNq7F IMTS - International Manufacturing Technology Show AMT - The Association For Manufacturing Technology

We opened our Oakland facility last week and expanded in the Chicagoland area less than two months ago. Two facilities with one thesis: manufacturers need automation without the capital risk. And we're not slowing down. More capacity & more proof that Robotics-as-a-Service works at scale.

Hiring is hard. Losing that new hire 2 months later is even harder. You post the job, screen the resumes, run the interviews, and onboard, train, ramp up. Then they resign, and you start over. Turnover isn't just a headache - it's a budget leak. Formic automation breaks the cycle. No capex, no added headcount to manage, just less turnover to backfill in the first place. Wyandot Snacks kept losing people to the same repetitive, physical roles. Formic automated the work. Now they're hiring more people for better jobs, and keeping them. Don't wait until you're buried in reqs to get ahead of it. Learn how to use your OpEx to overcome churn: https://lnkd.in/eWE8Zz8c

The factory automation market is projected to grow from $347.41B in 2026 to $544.59B by 2030. AI-enabled systems and smart factory adoption are cited as the main drivers of that growth. But here's the part that gets left out of most market reports: a lot of the manufacturers who stand to benefit most from that growth are small and mid-sized plants that can't absorb a six- or seven-figure capital outlay to get there. That's the gap Formic was built to close. Full Service Automation puts robotics on a flat monthly rate, no capex, no ownership risk, so the manufacturers actually running production lines can capture the same efficiency gains as the enterprise players funding the market growth. https://lnkd.in/eMfeZ9_z

The next technology revolution won’t happen behind a desk. It will happen on factory floors, construction sites, farms, and in the other dirty, dusty, and dangerous corners of our economy. That’s why Formic is proud to sponsor Dirty Jobs 2026, hosted by Jay Kapoor at VSC Ventures. We’re building toward the same future: one where automation takes on the jobs that are hardest to fill and hardest on people - while making US more productive and competitive. Looking forward to joining the 300+ founders and investors building that future on Wed 9/23 in SF. Links to learn more: https://dirtyjobs.ai https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8-4OJPtq-o #PhysicalAI #Robotics #Automation #Manufacturing

The Bay Area built the last decade of software, and it's positioned to build a meaningful share of the next decade of physical AI. And manufacturing is where that shows up first. Project Prometheus just leased 100,000 square feet in West Oakland, and Tesla signed a lease at the same site days later for its own robotics operations. Both are betting on the same square mile we are. Robotics research, humanoid development, and AI model work are concentrated here... what's been missing is a place where that research meets a working factory floor, where a humanoid or an AMR fleet runs against real production constraints instead of a demo stage. That's part of why we opened our newest facility in Oakland. Physical AI doesn't get proven in a lab - it gets proven on a line, running a shift, next to the people who run that shift every day.

95% sounds impressive. In manufacturing, it's a failure. Robots on the plant floor run through roughly 10,000 cycles a day. At 95% accuracy, that's hundreds of failures every single day. Formic's Saman Farid breaks down why the reliability bar for manufacturing robotics is nothing like the bar anywhere else, and why "good enough" isn't good enough on the line. Full episode here: https://lnkd.in/eWk3Y4ia

Formic's Oakland facility is officially open, and it marks an addition to what we're building. Our Chicagoland facility proved the model at scale, and Oakland is the next chapter: humanoid robotics, physical AI, and a fleet that's already the largest independent one in the U.S. We chose the Bay Area because it's becoming the center of gravity for physical AI, and we wanted to be building alongside that momentum, not watching from the outside. This facility is one piece of a bigger buildout, with more regions to come beyond the Midwest and West Coast. Read the full release: https://lnkd.in/edAdr3Zz

Most conversations about automation in CPG start and end with palletizing. That's the easy part. The harder problem is everything around it: case packing that handles SKU changeovers without a full line stop, pallet wrapping that keeps pace with a packing line running variable case sizes, and the labor to staff all of it on a line that shifts weekly. Formic Fast Track bundles case erecting, packing, sealing, and palletizing into one end-of-line system, deployed and running on a flat monthly rate. We've built this for CPG plants running the exact kind of format variability that makes off-the-shelf automation quotes fall apart. More here: https://lnkd.in/eDiPrh6U If your end-of-line is still the bottleneck on your fastest packing line, that's a Formic problem to solve, not a headcount problem.