This month, we’re sitting down with Formic CEO Saman Farid. Formic uses software, financing & an operational footprint to make it easy for factories to adopt robots. 

Here’s a lightly edited version of the conversation:

Q: Tell us a little about your background and why you decided to become a founder.

A: I built and sold two smaller lifestyle startups, then became a VC for about 15 years. During that time, I became convinced that the way robotics were being deployed today is completely unscalable, and we needed a way to bring about abundance through a massively bigger robot labor force. Formic was the result of tugging on that thread until we felt we had an answer.

Q: What sparked the inspiration for this company?

A: Automation technology has existed for 30+ years, but 90% of factories didn’t have robots. After watching my fair share of Sci-Fi movies, it was obvious that the robot revolution was inevitable. I couldn’t help but feel frustrated by how few robots there were helping us make things. After learning about the things that unblocked adoption in other industries like cloud computing and residential solar, I realized many of those lessons could be applied to robotics to make it much easier for factories to adopt.

Q: What challenges did you face in starting Formic? Why has this never been done before?

A: Formic is the first company to combine an understanding of software (to help configure robots and make them “fungible”) with operational expertise (the ability to manage and deploy robots efficiently at scale) and financial strength (we built access to $250M of debt capital in our first year to fund robot purchases). Working across those three disciplines is incredibly complex, but it unlocks this opportunity for us.

Q: In what specific ways will your technology help to improve the American manufacturing industry over the next decade?

A: American Manufacturing has stagnated for the last 10+ years as we’ve offshored most critical production capabilities, and at the same time, we face a terrible demographic crisis. There are currently more than 1 million unfilled manufacturing jobs in the US. Factories have a 20%+ turnover per month; as a result, many factories sit idle for the majority of the year because they can’t run product. We’re determined to get these facilities producing at scale, and as a result, bring about a world of abundance.

We recently announced new software tools to accelerate and simplify the deployment of robotic automation systems for businesses with no internal expertise. Check out how our operating system makes working with robotic automation solutions as easy as using your smartphone, Apple CarPlay, or Netflix.

Q: What advice would you give to other founders looking to build in a similar space? Things you wish you could tell your younger self?

A: I think it’s important to remember manufacturing businesses are historically very conservative and resistant to change. A motto we have internally is “you either solve 100% of a problem or 0% of the problem”—in the case of manufacturers, that means if you want them to adopt, you really have to take ALL the work, and basically all of the risk off their plates. Being so “full stack” is complex and difficult, but historically, the biggest businesses in the world have always been operationally complex.