Formant tackles robot operations challenges with a unified platform
If you're building a SaaS company or web application, you don't need to deploy your own analytics solution. It's specialized work with many edge cases, and for most companies it's far from their core platform, so it simply doesn't make sense.
Formant does something similar for robotics, helping automation companies with a set of shortcuts that speed up their time to market. The company has three main focus areas: remotely controlled autonomous bots, analytics, and monitoring.
The company raised $18 million in funding led by SignalFire, with participation from a number of venture capitalists and strategic investors, including Hillsven, Pelion, Goodyear Ventures, Thursday Ventures, Ericsson, Picus Capital and Holman Growth Ventures.
“We founded this in 2017, when I left Google and brought my team with me. I worked in the robotics group and saw an opportunity. The insight was that robotics hardware was incredible, and people like those at Boston Dynamics were really pushing the boundaries. Before that, we had 20-25 years of industrial robots that are incredibly precise, powerful, and build every car you see on the road. Yet the software was stuck in the stone age. There is no single operating system. Everyone builds every part of the stack for every application. If you were building a company, you of course had to develop your own perception and autonomy. But on top of that, you also had to handle data management and everything else. We saw an opportunity to create a universal solution that could expand the capabilities of many companies”
Linnell left Google to found Formant. It started with an API that allowed a machine or robot to request help from a human. For example, imagine a cart stuck in a corner. The robot got confused and could call for help. A person can drive the robot to free it using a D-pad or joystick, then press a "resume" button so the robot can continue on its way.
The company then built a more robust platform to help manage edge cases in robotics and, in particular, robot fleets. Linnell said: "We don't really touch the autonomous part of the robot. Making the robot do what you need is still the responsibility of our customers. But when it fails, or when you need to figure out what happened when something went wrong, or if you need to determine whether the robot is performing well, that's where our software comes in."
If your robot vacuum has ever gotten stuck behind a couch, this use case will make sense to you. Except for much larger and potentially more dangerous robots, which have all kinds of fault-tolerant features so they stop before bumping into things until their batteries run out. Other use cases may require a bit more context.
“Imagine you work in the service department of a company that makes floor-cleaning robots. You notice a trend that a certain set of robots struggles in a particular area of the warehouse. You see it happen, or someone contacts support to complain, or a customer says, "Hey, we have poor performance here." You might notice that Wi-Fi signal strength drops in that corner of the warehouse”
Of course, if Wi-Fi drops out completely, most robots are smart enough to report it, but problems like low connection speed or timeouts can become a troubleshooting nightmare without sending a (very expensive) customer service engineer to the warehouse or using something like Formant's software. The fix may be as simple as plugging in a Wi-Fi extender.
“A third use case might be a business owner who wants to measure the return on investment of a fleet of 200 robots working in a specific warehouse, using performance statistics. How many times do they need help? How much time do they spend doing their work autonomously compared to being manually controlled? Think of it as an analytics workflow where you look at dashboards showing data trends over days, months, weeks, and years”
According to the company, most customers come to Formant to solve one of these three specific problems and then stay to get the full solution. Another advantage is that Formant offers a platform for gaining a broader view of performance across a range of different robotics manufacturers.
“Some of our large customers work with a diverse robot fleet. They may have an autonomy department interested in robots from several vendors, and they may need a unified data platform that can communicate with a Boston Dynamics robot, a Fanuc robot, a DJI drone, and keep all that data in one database. Using Formant, they will know what is happening across their heterogeneous robot fleet. And no robot manufacturer can offer that”
The company says its software has been used to run tens of thousands of robots, and it plans to spend the next 12-18 months doubling the size of Formant, building engineering and sales operations, and expanding into Europe. The company is hiring in several locations, including Pittsburgh.
“A few years ago we acquired a stealth teleoperation company based in Pittsburgh. It has Carnegie Mellon University and probably more autonomous driving companies than even the Bay Area. Pittsburgh has a huge robotics community, and we plan to keep investing there. I believe it is one of the hubs alongside Cambridge, Massachusetts and the Bay Area. The cost of doing business in Pittsburgh is very different: you get top talent, but it is very cost-effective”
