Operationalizing Robot Fleets at Scale: Our Lead Investment in Formant

We are excited to announce BMW i Ventures is leading a $21M round in Formant, a cloud data and operations platform that helps robotics companies easily deploy, scale, and manage their fleets.

With decreasing sensor and compute costs, improving AI model fidelity, and rising labor costs, we are seeing an accelerated pace of adoption in service robots. While early adopter industries such as warehousing and logistics have already begun expanding their fleets, companies in agriculture, oil & gas, construction, and hospitality have also started to explore and deploy robotic fleets to increase their operational efficiency, bolster worker safety, and mitigate effects from the labor shortage.

As the fleet of deployed robots scale in the field, we see a shift in evolving needs for both the robot vendor and end customer. For example, robot vendors need to be able to monitor and manage the performance and configuration of their fleet of robots. If a robot malfunctions, vendors need to be able to remotely intervene and control the robot with low-latency connection.

To troubleshoot and make continuing improvements to the autonomy software, they also need to ingest, visualize, and analyze the unstructured data feeding from the robots. The end customer will also need a centralized command center to monitor fleet performance across different SKUs of robots, instead of toggling between multiple vendor applications. However, most robot vendors and end customers do not have these capabilities today and need more resources to develop them.  To build just a simple robotics data platform in-house, robot vendors would need to invest millions of dollars and valuable resources (e.g., DevOps, full-stack data engineers) to set up the basic cloud infrastructure and data pipelines. They will need to spend magnitudes more to run the platform in production and maintain it as they scale. As a result, similar to how many software categories have made the concurrent shift from integrated to modular architectures, we anticipate robot companies and customers will progressively shift to purchasing off-the-shelf, purpose-built tools to save costs and focus on core engineering needs.

Founded in 2017, Formant delivers the cloud infrastructure needed to effectively and cost-efficiently deploy and scale robotic fleets across any industry. Its platform includes the whole slice of open infrastructure and applications necessary to connect any robot to any user workflow.  These include remote operation for real-time robot command and control, business analytics for managing data at scale, and real-time fleet visual interfaces for running day-to-day operations. Importantly, this platform can also be used by end customers and can integrate robots from multiple vendors to establish a single-pane-of-glass for operations. By offering these features, Formant enables mission-critical infrastructure at a fraction of the costs required for companies to develop themselves while allowing a faster time-to-market to operationalize fleets.

With increasing robot adoption and a growing trend toward solution outsourcing, Formant has experienced record growth over the past year. The platform now powers tens of thousands of deployed robots and is being used by both blue chip enterprises, such as BP and Blue River Technology (a subsidiary of John Deere), and industry leaders, such as Burro, Scythe, and Knightscope. With the leadership of industry veterans Jeff Linnell (Founder and CEO), James Turnshek (Chief Architect), and Kate MeLynda (President), we are excited for the company’s continued growth and thrilled to support the company as they underpin this trend in automation.