Formic: Closing the Adoption Gap in Factory Robotics

“Robots are the only way my business survives, but it’s not viable for me.”

Formic founder and CEO Saman Farid joins Brett Gibson, managing partner at Initialized to unpack why that mindset keeps factories from adopting automation and how Formic closes the gap.

They cover: de-risking with financing, productizing complete robot work cells, and running fleets with teleoperation, intelligent error recovery, and careful staging to hit factory-grade uptime.

You’ll hear why palletizing is the ideal first beachhead, how the team cut deployment costs roughly in half, and why they say no to one-off requests until they can be productized.

Saman also shares how the company resists “fun” engineering in favor of scale, injects controlled chaos into his company, uses daily 8 a.m. meetings for problem solving, and bridges the culture gap between the manufacturing and software industries.

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Follow Formic and Saman for more:

Formic: https://x.com/goformic

Saman: https://x.com/samanfarid

Content

(00:00) “It’s not viable for me”—closing the adoption gap

(00:44) What Formic does & where robots work today

(02:24) Engineer → VC → founder: why start Formic

(04:38) Adoption vs flashy demos. Solve one task well

(05:47) De-risking with financing; manual first, then automate

(08:23) The playbook: scope, build modules, deploy, operate1

(10:36) Work cells, not just arms

(13:38) 99.9% uptime15:01 Why palletizing was the first beachhead

(16:49) Cutting costs per deployment

(18:08) Saying “no” & expanding scope the right way

(21:15) Resisting “fun” engineering to serve more factories

(22:07) Injecting chaos into your company

(23:34) Daily 8am to crack hard problems

(25:40) Culture clash: manufacturing × software

(27:24) Evaluating new robots, regional rollouts

(31:24) Where AI helps across the org

(37:11) What’s next: more robots, more tasks, more factories