Formant
Assembly Line
Formant to Use Latest Funding to Hire Experts for Secure Cloud Robotics Platform
Formant today announced the completion of a $21 million funding round. The San Francisco-based company said it plans to use the proceeds to expand hiring across all departments, introduce new products and features, and accelerate growth. BMW i Ventures led Formant’s investment, with participation from new investors Intel Capital, GS Futures. Previous investors, including SignalFire, Hillsven, Pelion Ventures, Holman, Ericsson, Goodyear Ventures, PICUS Capital, and Thursday Ventures, also participated.
Earlier this year, Formant launched Theopolis, an artificial intelligence language interface to enable non-technical users to interact directly with robot data and build visualizations inside its software. Formant claimed that it supports easy integrations with tools such as ROS 2, NVIDIA’s Isaac simulator, and Clearpath’s Outdoor Navigation.
Formant is solving the robotic Tower of Babel with a unified platform
If youre building a SaaS company or a web app, you’re not going to roll your own analytics solution — it’s specialized work with lots of edge cases, rabbit holes and, for most companies, it’s so far removed from the core platform, that it just doesn’t make sense. Formant is doing kinda-sorta the same thing for robotics, helping automation companies with a number of shortcuts that speed up their time to market. The company has three major strings to its bow: remote-controlling autonomous bots (“operation”), analytics and “why is my robot being so dumb,” — or “observe,” as Formant would no doubt prefer I referred to it
The company just closed an $18 million Series A round led by SignalFire, with participation from a selection of VCs and strategic investors, including Hillsven, Pelion, Goodyear Ventures, Thursday Ventures, Ericsson, Picus Capital and Holman Growth Ventures.