We’re excited to announce that Formant has raised $18 million in our Series A fundraising round (read more on TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and Robotics 24/7).
The round was led by SignalFire, with participation from Hillsven, Pelion, Goodyear Ventures, Thursday Ventures, Ericsson, Picus Capital, and Holman Strategic Ventures. This latest investment round will fuel customer acquisition growth and help us better serve our growing number of customers and partners.
2021 was a year of growth across the board at Formant. Our product team shipped a number of new features to support new and existing customers, including custom views, relocalization in teleop, and role-based access control. We also invested significantly in our APIs and developer toolkit, and saw customers such as Burro and John Deere use Formant’s APIs to customize their dashboards as they scaled up their robot deployments.
Another area of focus for us in 2021 was partnerships. In addition to our existing partnerships with Boston Dynamics, NVIDIA, NTT, and others, we teamed up with PickNik Robotics to bring cloud-based mobile manipulation to the forefront of robotics.
We also managed to have some fun last year, despite the circumstances. We let reporters from the BBC and Morning Brew use our teleoperation software to walk Spot the robot dog around our office, the beach and streets of San Francisco remotely. We also opened up the ability to control Spot remotely to everyone with our Play with Spot campaign, which saw over 5,000 people from around the world log in and control Spot.
2022 will be another year of rapid growth at Formant. We’re hiring across all departments, and plan to double the size of the team by the end of the year. We will continue to invest in making our platform extensible, as well as partnering with best-of-breed solutions to help robotics companies build out their stacks.
If you’re interested in learning how Formant can help accelerate the growth of your robotic fleet, feel free to reach out.
Here’s to seeing more robotics companies succeed and grow in 2022!
Best,
Jeff
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