A Year In Review: Formant 2022

When reflecting on 2022, it’s hard for us to pinpoint just one moment from all we worked on. 

2022 was a year of growth for us. We welcomed 21 InFormants to our team and hosted our largest company summit in Carmel Valley, CA. 

Here’s a peek into a few interesting details of our platform:  

• We experienced customer growth across multiple industries, most notably with an 83% growth in agriculture, 150% in facilities services, and 67% in warehousing and logistics compared to 2021. 
• Just as with our team, our fleet grew also, with the number of active devices on our platform increasing by 400%
• The number of activities on our platform increased by +450%
• Our platform saw tens of thousands of remote assist and teleoperation sessions. 
• ROS continues to be a popular choice for building robot applications amongst RaaS customers, with 67.9% of our customers choosing to use ROS. 

However, stats can only tell a small part of our 2022 journey. With a diversity of projects and features, each team focused on, we wanted to hear from our team members about their biggest product highlight of 2022. 

Here’s what they had to say. 

Highlights from our team:

Jeff, Founder & CEO:

"In 2022 we saw a massive influx of customers, who’s demand for functionality and platform scalability pushed us to radically improve our product. We made critical investments in the features,  infrastructure, team to address the needs of our scaling customers"

John, Product:

"I believe the highest impact product feature shipped in 2022 was the ability to customize the data platform, whether it’s customizing the UI to map to the specific use case with low code or using our APIs to build custom portals. This feature has enabled our customers to build use cases, vertical-specific user interfaces, design custom workflows or expose portals to their customers! Customization has also enabled our customers to use one data platform for their robotics operations as opposed to building multiple data pipelines for different use cases."

Paul, Product:

"My favorite feature is adding some of the more interesting and advanced custom modules to the product. For example, users can add a terminal module that allows them to quickly diagnose or command their robot without leaving the overview page. We’ve also included modules for sending ROS topics or making ROS service callers. All things to put people in more control if their machines."

Jesica, Customer Success:

“I love working with the Informant team and seeing all the innovation and hard work improving our platform for our clients. A few of my favorite releases were the improvement of our eventing engine 1.5; events in Formant are a powerful way to stay on top of issues that require user attention. This Feature helps our customers to provide a better service and efficiently debug their fleet."

Tanim, Customer Success:

“In my opinion, the ability to drop in additional functionality by adding a module from our growing library of pre-written custom modules is a huge step in enabling customers to get more insight out of the platform and saves engineers and operators time to focus on the actual application, instead of developing custom code themselves.”

James, Chief Architect:

“For me, our most exciting progress in 2022 was all around platform extensibility. Now customers can build their own configurable, contextual UI modules that communicate with custom packages that they deploy to robots. This means that they can very quickly implement whatever specific visualizations or controls they need to run their fleet beyond what we offer out-of-the-box.”

Richard, Engineering:

“We've pushed our customer's capabilities to extend Formant's platform even further this year with modules of their own, custom modules let our customers show off the value of their robots to the companies they serve and create custom interfaces to make operations even easier.  Users can now take advantage of key-value storage APIs, passive real-time data connections that don't interrupt teleop, dynamic module configuration UIs, and deeper integration of the dashboard configuration screens administrators use to serve operators."

Shaun, Marketing:

“In 2022 we worked hard to ensure our platform is scalable and delivers quality performance for customers with large fleets. It might not be glamorous, but improving our backend and guaranteeing SLAs for key services like teleoperation goes a long way to making sure the robotics companies that use Formant are successful.”

Luis, Sales:

“This past year, we rolled out Native Support for ROS Service calls. Manual service calls used to take up extra time and energy, but integrating service calls on Formant allows them to respond in less than 10 seconds!”