Formic raised $50 million to rent robots to factories that can't afford to buy them

Formic said on Thursday, Oct. 22, 2026, that it raised $50 million in growth capital, including a Series B led by Mercato Partners and debt financing from S2G Investments, to expand its physical AI platform.

The humanoid-robot hype cycle is about what robots might do someday. Formic is about whether a robot actually shows up and stacks boxes on a Tuesday. Renting robots by the hour gets around the real blocker for small and mid-size factories: they can't spend millions up front and hire integrators to find out if automation works. 750,000 production hours is a real track record. The leap to "general-purpose" is the hard part, and it's where a lot of robotics money has gone to die, so watch whether the next milestone is new kinds of jobs, not just more palletizers.

Formic said it raised $50 million in growth capital. That is a Series B, a later-stage venture round, led by Mercato Partners, with Light Ray Ventures, Lightscape Partners, Citi, and others, plus debt financing, a loan, from S2G Investments. The announcement gives the $50 million as one total. It does not say how that total splits between the stock round and the debt. Those lines are Formic's, in its Oct. 22 announcement.

Formic, the Chicago-area company, calls itself a "commercialization platform for physical AI." Physical AI, here, means software that runs machines in a real factory, not only a chat window. It uses a robot-as-a-service model: manufacturers pay for robots working on their lines instead of buying the machines and hiring people to install them. Those lines are Formic's.

Formic says its robots have logged more than 750,000 hours of live production, across more than 100 facilities in more than 30 states, over more than five years. Live production means the machines were doing the job on a real line, not a demo. Those figures are Formic's.

The plan is to expand from task-specific automation, such as palletizing, stacking goods onto a pallet, to general-purpose robotics, and to move into metal fabrication, aerospace, space, defense, medical, and energy. Those lines are Formic's. The announcement does not state a valuation, a revenue figure, or whether the company is profitable.

Saman Farid, the founder and chief executive, said, "building a capable robot and making it productive in a real factory are two very different challenges." That quotation is his.

The picture is Formic's, distributed with the announcement: palletizing robot systems lined up and ready to ship at its Bolingbrook, Illinois facility.

In plain terms, Formic said on Thursday that it raised $50 million, a Series B plus debt, to rent robots to factories. The machines have already worked more than 750,000 hours on real lines. The company did not publish a valuation or a revenue figure, and it did not split the $50 million between the stock round and the loan.