Formic raises $50 million, including $10 million in asset-backed financing, to take its robots-as-a-service model into general-purpose robots

Formic said on Oct. 22 it raised $50 million in growth capital. CEO Saman Farid told Axios the total is a $40 million Series B plus $10 million in asset-backed financing. The company said the equity round was led by Mercato Partners, with Light Ray Ventures, Lightscape Partners, Citi and other new and existing investors joining, and that S2G Investments provided the debt.

What the investors are buying is an operation that installs, services and finances robots, more than any new robot technology. Formic's robots-as-a-service model bundles equipment, deployment software, field crews, maintenance and financing into one monthly payment with no upfront capital from the customer. The round was pitched on operating numbers: hundreds of robots in more than 100 facilities across over 30 states, more than 750,000 hours of live production, 99.6% fleet uptime and a 97% customer renewal rate. Ryan Sanders of Mercato, who joins Formic's board, said the bottleneck "moves from the lab to the loading dock."

The case for something bigger is where the money goes. Formic says it will move from task-specific jobs such as palletizing and case packing into general-purpose robotics and train future systems on data from its current fleet. That route runs through another company's model: Formic is adapting Physical Intelligence's robotic foundation models with its own production data for manufacturing. The release photo shows a humanoid case-packing bagged product next to a Formic palletizer.

Formic says it now puts robots into production about three times faster than it did a year ago.