In an era where automation and AI are transforming industries, Saman Farid, Founder and CEO of Formic Technologies, stands out as a visionary driving manufacturing productivity. With his background in engineering and venture capital, Saman brings a unique perspective to the challenges and opportunities in this sector.

Formic’s Origin Story

Saman’s career began as an engineer, building manufacturing facilities across China and the US. After launching, scaling, and exiting a software company, he spent over ten years as a venture capitalist at Baidu Ventures investing at the intersection of AI, machine learning, and the physical world. From this vantage point, he identified a clear market gap: “There was a tremendous opportunity to improve the adoption of robotics and AI in the physical world,” Saman notes. “The tools were thriving in Silicon Valley but had very, very limited adoption in the real world. I realized that if I didn’t start this company now, I’d regret it for the rest of my life.” In 2020, Saman left to found Formic.

Formic’s Solution

Formic is automating processes to address the critical labor shortage in the manufacturing industry. With the number of unfilled US manufacturing jobs projected to hit 2.1 million by 2030, factories often sit idle, unable to meet production demands. Formic’s robotics solutions help fill these labor gaps, while enhancing factory productivity and production quality.

Image Credits: Stanley Yuan via X

Saman highlights why fewer than 10 percent of American manufacturers utilize industrial robotics: high complexity, lack of expertise, and prohibitive upfront costs. “Factories that are not familiar with this technology have a hard time making an investment in something they believe is such a huge risk”, he explains, “What Formic does to resolve those concerns is provide the full service offering. Factories pay us an hourly rate for the robots to do a job and we do everything, from the system design, to deployment, to maintenance. This end-to-end solution takes the pain and headache away and makes their lives easier.”

Formic’s Customers and How Formic Delivers Value

Formic’s manufacturer customer base includes food and beverage, aerospace and defense, and healthcare products. Today, Formic’s robots operate in nearly 100 manufacturing facilities, each customized for specific production tasks such as packing or stacking.

The company has achieved a 98% contract renewal rate, a testament to the value and reliability of Formic’s solutions. “It speaks to the fact that we solve a critical need in our customers’ production processes,” Saman notes. “We provide service and uptime guarantees, perform all necessary maintenance, and use our software to remotely manage and diagnose issues. As a result, the customer has peace of mind that their production process won’t be stopped because of us.”

The Role of Software in Formic’s Solutions

Beyond robotics hardware, Formic has built automation software that enhances robotic efficiency, reliability, and adaptability.

A key application of this software is creating digital twins of customers’ factories, which helps Formic determine each facility’s idiosyncratic requirements. The software selects and designs the optimal robots and processes, which before Formic, required significant engineering resources.

Formic Core is the company’s proprietary operating system, which feeds data at the robot level back to Formic’s central command center. “It allows us to automatically generate the programs that run on the robot,” Saman explains. “Today the robot may be working on one product and tomorrow they may be working on another. The robot needs to be adaptive to all those different requirements, so Formic Core allows our customers to quickly switch between different tasks, instantly generate the robot program, and validate it to that task.”

Formic’s Future Vision

Saman highlights the significance of building a company in manufacturing automation at a time of unprecedented growth. “All of our capabilities in the physical world are downstream of manufacturing power,” he explains. “At the end of the day, our ability to have a resilient food supply chain, a strong military, good infrastructure, roads and schools – all comes from our ability to actually make these things.”

With Formic’s recent $27.4M Series A fundraise, the company is building on commercial success by expanding to new geographies and use cases. Formic is also investing in advanced AI-enabled software to continue accelerating their growth. In the long term, Saman envisions a future where American manufacturing is revitalized and globally competitive, driven by advanced automation.

“If we do our jobs well, we will be the largest workforce provider for American factories.”

To sign up for progress updates on Formic and for more information on open roles, visit https://formic.co/.

Blackhorn Ventures is thrilled to announce our latest investment in Formic, a business set to revolutionize manufacturing with their industrial Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) platform. Leading the $27.4 million Series A+ round alongside co-investors Mitsubishi HC Capital America, NEC, Translink Capital, Alumni Ventures, FJ Labs, Lux Capital, Initialized Capital and Lorimer Ventures, we are excited to support Formic in their mission to revolutionize manufacturing by making automation accessible to the 90% of US manufacturers not currently leveraging automation – especially to small and medium-sized manufacturers.

Led by serial entrepreneur Saman Farid, Formic is democratizing access to the latest robotic systems, offering a scalable, flexible solution that aligns with the diverse needs of manufacturers.  What the PPA did for solar, Formic is doing for industrial robots; offering Robots-as-a-Service to make automation simple, affordable, and fast – ensuring businesses of all sizes can thrive in the global marketplace. Formic handles all scoping, design, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance for a robot for one low hourly rate, saving manufacturing and industrial companies time and money from their first day of service.

Formic has deployed its fleet of robotic automation equipment in 60+ facilities, generating $20M+ in total contract value, wth a 97% renewal rate, and strong upselling of the expanding customer base. Formic delivers a 50% reduction in industry standard implementation time, delivering value faster than traditional robotics vendors.  They are OEM agnostic, and boast a 99.43%+ uptime over the last 12 months with over 100k production hours achieved this year.  Most importantly, they allow for cost-competitive robotics in areas where labor shortages are a major limiting factor for manufacturing output.

The adoption of robotics and automation on the factory floor are being accelerated by rising labor costs, growing production demands, advancements in technology, geopolitical pressures, and supply chain disruptions necessitating reshoring​​. The U.S. is currently facing a severe labor shortage, particularly in the manufacturing sector: compared to pre-pandemic levels this critical pillar on economic competitiveness has 1.9 million fewer workers. This shortage is exacerbated by an aging workforce;10,000 baby boomers retire every day, which will result in 2-2.5 million manufacturing jobs unfilled by 2030. The traditional labor market is struggling to keep up, driving the need for solutions to boost industrial productivity amidst an unprecedented boom in American manufacturing.

Introducing automation into a manufacturing production process for the first time using the traditional playbook is a daunting task. There is only 1 robotic programming engineer for every 11 manufacturing facilities in the US. Existing engineering and maintenance teams inside these facilities don’t have the skill sets to operate and maintain automation equipment after it is deployed. This leads to a continued degradation in system performance over time, resulting in abandonment of automation and a return to “the way we’ve always done it”. These failures are the hallmark of traditional automation projects and the entire reason Formic was founded. The team developed Robots-as-a-Service to eliminate financial and operational barriers and deliver a guaranteed way for US manufacturers to have continued operational success resulting in increased productivity, quality, and safety.

A Brighter Future Through Automation in Manufacturing

Formic provides fully managed automation with no upfront capital expenditure. Their service includes 24/7 monitoring, maintenance, and performance guarantees. By leasing robots to industrial customers on a short-term basis, Formic allows businesses to reduce operating expenses by 40%, double production capacity, and start making payments only after the system is operational. Formic offers flexible contracts and the ability to scale automation as needed, making it easier for manufacturers to adopt and benefit from off-the-shelf robotic technology.

Formic’s vertically integrated RaaS platform de-risks the process of scoping, deploying, maintaining, supporting, and repurposing of robots for its customers. Key components of Formic’s technology stack include:

• Ant (Edge Device): An embedded IoT product that interfaces with Formic’s robotic fleet, enabling real-time data gathering for advanced analytics and diagnostics.
• Core (Operating System): An equipment agnostic operating system accessed through a simple touch screen interface, making deployment and operation faster and easier than ever before.
• Colony (Fleet Management): A SaaS product that integrates maintenance, billing, asset management, and performance data, automating fleet management decisions with machine learning.
• Portal (Customer UI): A mobile and web-enabled application providing customers with comprehensive data on their robots, from billing to usage specifics.
• Swarm (Engineering Tools for Integrators): Augmented reality and workflow automation tools for scoping, designing, simulating, and generating blueprints for robotic deployments​​​​.

Enhancing Competitiveness and Sustainability Through Automation and Reshoring

Formic’s approach enhances manufacturing competitiveness by unlocking capacity to enable streamlined reshoring and reduction of transportation-related emissions. Domestic supply chains, estimated to emit 25% less than their global counterparts, will benefit from increased production efficiency and reduced workplace injuries. Robots are expected to create more high-quality jobs than they displace, transforming the manufacturing landscape and improving working conditions. By enabling a significant reduction in long-distance transportation by strengthening domestic production capabilities, Formic is having a meaningful impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The Formic Team: Domain Expertise Across Robotics and Fintech

Formic is led by a seasoned team of experts in robotics, finance, and automation:

• Saman Farid, Co-Founder and CEO: An experienced operator and investor, Saman previously founded an e-commerce company and Comet Labs, a venture capital firm focused on robotic automation. He also served as Head of US Investing for Baidu Ventures.
• Jack Wagler, CFO: Promoted to CFO in June 2022, Jack was previously Treasurer and VP of Finance at Formic. He has extensive experience in specialty finance, having worked at Tyr Partners and EY.
• Steve Olszewski, COO: Prior to joining Formic, Steve was General Manager at Financeit and President and CEO of Spruce Finance, where he managed residential distributed energy resources​​.
• Shawn Fitzgerald, VP of Marketing & Sales: In his previous roles as President of Thomasnet and CMO at Xometry, Shawn managed manufacturing marketplaces providing supply chain solutions for US manufacturers.

At Blackhorn Ventures, we believe in the transformative power of automation to revitalize our industrial base.  We’re proud to support Formic in their mission to revolutionize the manufacturing industry. For a limited time Formic is allowing select US manufacturers to try robotic palletizing in their facility for just $4,750 / month, shipped in 24 hours, fully installed and with 100% maintenance included – for more info click here. For more information on open roles at Formic, visit their job board here.

Tell me a little about yourself. What life experiences brought you here today? When did you decide you wanted to be an entrepreneur?

I came from a family of entrepreneurs – my parents both owned their own businesses (mom owned a beauty salon, dad a recruiting agency) and my grandfather owned a candy business. I grew up as an only child with divorced parents, so I was very independent from a young age. Watching my family of entrepreneurs, I developed curiosity, drive, and a bias towards action.

My first venture into entrepreneurship was when I was 10 years old; I started a mailbox painting business in Danville. I made marketing flyers and bought supplies in bulk, offered opportunities to upsell customers (adding address numbers or a red flag for an additional fee).

I maintained my entrepreneurial spirit into my early adulthood, but I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do with it. In college, I worked as a valet and one night I had a memorable conversation with an older gentleman. We were discussing life; his wife had recently passed away and he gave me some advice: “Life is not defined by what you have, but rather what you’ve done. Life is about experiences, not accumulating nice things.” That really stuck with me.

After undergrad, I channeled my competitiveness and understanding of numbers into a job in corporate finance. After 8 years of this, I realized that while I was impactful, ultimately I was just a number. This didn’t sit too well with me. I realized that I wanted to do more, and find an avenue to apply my entrepreneurial spirit. I didn’t want to have any regrets. So I took a risk and left the comfort of a job at a big bank and went into a space that was unfamiliar to me (tech) and started to learn. I handed in my Blackberry, picked up a laptop, and learned what ingredients went into building a software business. By doing this, I got comfortable with being uncomfortable. As an entrepreneur, you do not know what comes tomorrow. I was used to structure and learning new skills in a new industry was a challenge, but it was worth it. It’s been 9 years now since I left. I never looked back.

If you weren’t building this company, what else would you be doing? What if money and prestige were no object?

If I could do anything outside of building ISO, I would still be trying to find solutions to problems and helping people. I enjoy working with children and have been a long time active member of The Guardsmen – an organization founded in the 1940s to raise money for at-risk youth in the Bay Area. We provide children with mentorship, capital to fund scholarship programs, and send them to summer camp. This program helps thousands of youth every year.

There are so many kids that grow up without resources and or opportunities to see different perspectives of the world. I believe that allowing children to gain new perspectives outside of their home environment is really important for their success. Focusing on finding solutions to positively impact youth drives me, and I plan to spend even more time involved with The Guardsmen later in my career.

What problem is ISO trying to solve?

ISO was created to fill an unmet need for reliable, verified supply chain performance data. ISO streamlines data reconciliation between shippers and their transportation partners, allowing them to identify and attribute the root-cause and financial impacts of supply chain failures to the responsible parties. When shippers and carriers operate on a single source of truth to create clean, actionable, and portable data, conversations between parties become more productive.

Through ISO’s modernized Performance Management workflow, partners align on a standardized source of truth, while simultaneously normalizing and correcting their flawed data. This normalized data can drive efficiencies across the entire supply chain ecosystem – from optimized carrier performance monitoring to industry-wide benchmarking, to efficient retailer deduction management, next generation procurement tools, and more.

Tell us about your team and the culture you’re building.

We’re a team of logistics and technology professionals with decades of experience from Uber, Google, FourKites, Flexport, C.H. Robinson, Echo Global Logistics, LinkedIn, Deloitte and other leading technology companies. We believe that culture is driven by the entire team. To that end, we gathered the team together at an offsite last October and aligned on the following company values:

• We provide a safe space to take risks
• We’re open and honest
• We look for new ideas everywhere
• We bias toward action
• We do the right thing, even when it’s hard

What is your ‘grand vision’ if everything goes right? How do you aim to transform your industry?

Ultimately, our mission is to become the industry’s trusted source of actionable supply chain performance data. If everything goes right, the industry will align on a standardized way to measure transportation performance; this will ultimately allow for cross-network data collaboration to maximize the world’s resources and drive efficiency and sustainability. The goal is to create a significant reduction in carbon output and waste in the world, allowing supply chain operators to spend less time doing manual tasks, automate processes and leverage bright minds in the industry to tackle more important issues.

What excites you most about your progress/traction to date?

We have an incredible team, incredible customers, and incredible global investors & advisors that believe in the mission & vision.

The odds were stacked against us from the beginning; 3 weeks after our Seed raise, the world shut down. We built an enterprise grade product for Fortune 1000 customers remotely and during a pandemic. The conditions we can’t control created higher hurdles, but we have incredible global customers that took a risk on us and we delivered. We’ve signed multi-year contracts, are delivering real value, and we’re seeing a lot of traction with new customers that want to work with ISO.

Lastly, we’re very excited about the value we’re bringing to carriers. The majority of carriers in the US are small businesses that own fewer than 10 trucks. Our platform digitizes & streamlines a process that they have been doing manually (scorecarding), and provides a single pane of glass for them to collaborate with their shipper-partners to showcase their service and grow their business. 

Blackhorn Ventures is proud to announce our latest investment in business intelligence platform Isometric Technologies, inc. (ISO), with participation from Maersk Growth and existing investors including Kindred Ventures and L37 Ventures. 

With this investment, Blackhorn further deepens our commitment to companies making groundbreaking developments in supply chain optimization and efficiency.  We believe ISO will become the industry standard for how performance is evaluated across the supply chain, and will do what FICO credit scores did to the lending industry.

ISO allows shippers to measure the monetary impact of service across their transportation network, and enables carriers to showcase their performance to shippers in a way they would never dream possible. Similar to how Google changed the way that web packets move around the internet, automation and data collaboration can do the same for supply chains. But not unless you know what exactly happened across the lifecycle of an order/shipment, the root-cause and responsible party of service failures, and its monetary impact. With this funding, ISO is building the foundation for that future, while eliminating waste across supply chains, lowering costs by matching service with freight needs, and reducing emissions by optimizing carrier-lane selection and helping shippers optimize warehouse operations.

The Problem

While COVID revealed the fragility of our modern supply chain system, the reality is that for far too long retailers, shippers, and carriers have all operated on separated, siloed systems of record, making it challenging to reconcile data and arrive at a source of truth. Flawed data results in billions of lost dollars from unjustified chargebacks and poor procurement decisions. 

Transportation spend accounts for ~10% of a shipper’s COGS. On average, ~80% of that transportation is contracted through RFPs on an annual basis. To make the problem even worse, procurement leaders do not have a reliable way to source new capacity; there is no verified source of service data available to evaluate over 500,000 carriers in the US. 

Ultimately, transportation planners are left making costly decisions based on inconsistent and unreliable data, without the information needed to be efficient and effective. Service data is the missing link in harmonizing how supply chains are orchestrated. Supply chain leaders need a neutral, third-party source of truth to collaborate on datasets with their business partners. Enter Isometric Technologies.

(Image courtesy of Blackhorn Ventures)

The Solution

ISOʼs cleaned and contextualized datasets are powering the next generation of procurement tools and fueling performance optimization for carriers and retailers.

ISO surfaces cost-savings opportunities and streamlines the data reconciliation process between manufacturers, transportation providers, and other third party stakeholders in the supply chain, acting as a single source of truth to measure the hidden costs of performance. By associating costs from chargebacks and service level failures to the responsible parties, ISO surfaces actionable insights that help optimize complex business relationships and identify negative trends in the supply chain.

(image courtesy of Isometric Technologies)

The Market Opportunity

With over 500,000 carriers in the US alone, and billions of dollars in service-related penalties at stake each year, service is more important now than ever. Given the supply chain disruptions throughout 2021 and 2022, the true cost of delays and breakdowns in the US and EU may exceed $4 trillion, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit. In addition to this newfound realization of how important supply chain integrity is, corporations are also gaining a greater understanding of how the influx of large amounts of data needs to be harnessed and systematized to improve the speed, cost efficiency and resiliency of business operations.

The Market Traction

Iso has deep traction with consumer package goods (CPG) shippers delivering into big box retailers. customer results are showing:

• 40% Less time reconciling data per operator
• 400% Data improvement compared to previous score-carding methods
• $15M Penalty exposure reduction measured across two customers in 6 months

ISO has processed over $50bln YTD in purchase order value while ISO’s customers have improved overall on-time delivery RDD (requested delivery date) by +22% on average since onboarding, improving service levels and demonstrating a commitment to service.  

“Now that we have that one place to go, we don’t have to run around discussing whose data is right and whose is wrong; we’re operating on the same dataset. Instead, we can discuss what areas we can improve and identify where we’re already doing well.”

Cory O’Malley, Business Intelligence Manager, ELITE Transit Solutions

 As the first third-party agnostic arbiter of supply chain performance data, ISO recently launched an ‘Excellence in Service Award’ celebrating excellence in carrier performance. ISO’s 2021 Excellence in Service Award winners were selected by analyzing a combination of data sets: aggregated and anonymized core KPI metrics for shipments measured by ISO, as well as engagement rates with their platform.

The Impact Opportunity

ISO primarily addresses UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 9 and 12 by improving supply chain resiliency through predictivity and enabling a pathway to better resource consumption through future elimination of delays and idling.  UN SDGs that ISO address include:

9. Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure – build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation 
10. Responsible Consumption and Production – ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns

The ISO solution addresses a key supply chain industry pain point with the potential to have significant ESG impact as part of their future product development plans. The team is planning to add a feature to help mitigate idling and delays; as trucks tend to idle with their engines on, any reduction in these activities would provide a direct emissions reduction.  A significant number of truck stops and waiting areas are in economically disadvantaged areas of the urban fabric so reducing emissions in these areas provides a further social equity benefit.  ISO is developing a green scorecard so shippers can assess the capital intensity of carriers, and at scale, the platform will be a key source of data for the implementation of electric trucking and the overall greening of the supply chain. 

In addition to price and service, sustainability is a critical dimension of supply chain operations.  Most sustainability scores underweight the true impact by omitting detentions, dwell times, early pickups, and other “nuts and bolts” of freight.  ISO is uniquely positioned to understand sustainability impact across a shippers entire operations.   By incorporating sustainability scores into the procurement process, ISO can help shippers reliably hit their emission targets with greater accuracy than ever before

(Image courtesy of Blackhorn Ventures)

The Team

The ISO team has an exceptional background: the company founders worked together as the founding team at Uber Freight, and not only have first-hand experience with the complex challenges in supply chain logistics, but also lead enterprise relationships, giving them the knowhow and network to be effective with ISO. Based on their collective capability, experience, and industry understanding, we think the ISO team stands out in the supply chain space:

CEO  Brian Cristol is building his third  Transportation & Logistics startup, and was previously co-founder of the Uber Freight team, where he worked as the Head of Enterprise Partnerships. Brian is passionate about solving the toughest supply chain problems for the world’s largest companies. With a background in corporate finance and technology startups, Brian is well-experienced building GTM strategy and scaling world-class sales teams (including at Uber, Turvo, and JP Morgan).

COO John Stauffer is a supply chain industry expert, and is building his sixth Transportation & Logistics startup.John has deep expertise in operations, product management, business development and customer success. John is a legendary builder; he was a founding member of both the Uber Freight product team and the Echo Logistics carrier sales team.

Led by a team with deep technical and supply chain expertise, the company has built the first collaborative SaaS platform to digitize the carrier scorecarding process. When shippers and carriers operate on a single source of truth, conversations between parties become more productive, and the supply chain gets stronger.

(image courtesy of Isometric Technologies)