Formic Raises $50 Million to Scale Physical AI Across American Manufacturing
Series B led by Mercato Partners will accelerate the expansion into general-purpose robotics, building on more than
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Formic, the commercialization platform for physical AI, today announced it has raised $50 million in growth capital. The financing includes a Series B led by Mercato Partners, with participation from Light Ray Ventures, Lightscape Partners, Citi, and other new and existing investors, as well as debt financing from S2G Investments.
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Formic palletizing systems ready to ship from its Bolingbrook, Illinois facility, part of a fleet operating across more than 100 facilities in over 30 states.
As AI models and robotics hardware become more capable, a fundamental challenge remains: getting robots to work reliably in real-world production environments. For more than five years, Formic has been solving this problem across American factory floors in more than 30 states, accumulating over 750,000 hours of live production experience. Its AI-powered software, robots, field operations, financing model, and production data infrastructure turn robotic capability into measurable industrial output every day.
Drawing on the team’s deep operational knowledge of deploying robots nationwide, Formic is expanding from task-specific automation into general-purpose robotics, enabling a broader range of robots to perform increasingly complex tasks across industries through a single platform that builds on the operational intelligence gained with each deployment. The funding will accelerate that shift and strengthen Formic’s AI and robotics capabilities. It will also help Formic expand into new applications such as metal fabrication and deepen its work in aerospace, space, defense, medical, energy, and the broader U.S. industrial base. The result: more manufacturers can grow domestic production capacity without the capital costs and complexity of traditional automation.
“The robotics industry has made extraordinary progress in what robots can do. But building a capable robot and making it productive in a real factory are two very different challenges,” said Saman Farid, founder and CEO of Formic. “We’ve spent five years building the commercialization platform that bridges that gap. Now we’re extending that platform from task-specific automation to general-purpose robotics, bringing more robots, more intelligence, and more capabilities into production without requiring manufacturers to build the infrastructure themselves. For manufacturers, that means they can grow output and keep production here in the U.S. without betting their balance sheet on it.”
The Commercialization Platform for Physical AI
Formic takes responsibility for the outcome of its systems, not just the installation. Formic’s Robot-as-a-Service model combines equipment, deployment software, field operations, maintenance, financing, and performance monitoring into one platform, all for one recurring monthly payment. The result is a single accountable partner responsible for bringing robots into production and keeping them productive, with no upfront capital investment required from the customer.
Today, Formic operates hundreds of robots across more than 100 facilities in over 30 states. Its fleet runs at 99.6% uptime, and 97% of customers renew. Applications span palletizing, case packing, machine tending, kitting, assist work, and more across food and beverage, consumer packaged goods, chemicals, aerospace, defense, packaging, and the broader U.S. industrial base.
These deployments represent more than an installed base. They provide the operational foundation for Formic’s next phase of scale and growth. Every robot operates in a real production environment, generating data about tasks, operating conditions, performance, and corrective actions. That feedback helps inform robot improvements and future deployments, creating the potential for a compounding advantage as the fleet grows and robotic capabilities advance. Formic now deploys robots into production approximately three times faster than it did a year ago.
“As robots get smarter, the bottleneck moves from the lab to the loading dock: deploying, servicing and financing robots in real plants,” said Ryan Sanders, Managing Director at Mercato Partners, who joins Formic’s Board of Directors. “Formic has built all three, and its customers stay and add robots. That’s the operating record you want underneath the next generation of physical AI.”
From Task-Specific Robots to General-Purpose Robotics
The next generation of physical AI will expand what robots can do. Formic will build on its existing deployment infrastructure to bring these increasingly capable systems into industrial environments. Its strategy is to serve more industries, automate more tasks, and deploy more types of robots through the same underlying platform, applying lessons and data collected from today’s task-specific operating fleet to train the next generation of general-purpose robotic systems.
Formic is already advancing this work with Physical Intelligence, combining its robotic foundation models with Formic’s production data and operational expertise to adapt them for manufacturing applications. Physical Intelligence recently highlighted Formic’s work in its Pi API beta announcement.
Formic assembles and tests its robots at its new facility in Bolingbrook, Illinois, and develops new capabilities at its R&D center in Oakland, California, giving it the capacity to deploy at a scale few can match.
“Formic has built a multi-year operating record across a large, active fleet, with systems that keep producing year after year. That kind of foundation is what supports growth at scale,” said Marisa Sweeney, Principal at S2G Investments. “We’re proud to support Formic as it puts more robots to work on American factory floors.”
About Formic
Founded in 2020, Formic is building the commercialization platform for physical AI, bringing increasingly capable robots into real-world manufacturing environments. Through its Robots-as-a-Service model, Formic combines robotic equipment, deployment software, field operations, financing, and production data to help manufacturers automate without upfront capital investment.
For one flat monthly rate, Formic provides the equipment and systems to perform the job, the service and parts to keep them running, and the technology and software to measure productivity and optimize performance. Formic’s mission is to accelerate automation across American manufacturing, helping businesses increase capacity, consistency, and reliability while reducing costs, downtime, and workplace safety risks.
Learn more at formic.co or contact hi@formic.co.
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