Cloud robotics startup Formant launches platform to observe, analyze, and operate robot fleets

Formant, a San Francisco-based cloud robotics company, emerged from stealth today and announced the availability of its platform, which enables businesses to automatically collect and analyze robotics data. By centralizing all application data in a single web UI, Formant allows business teams, operators, and engineers to improve the efficacy of their robotic workforce.

Founded in 2017 by by a team of former Google, Savioke, and Redwood Robotics software engineers, roboticists, and product managers and led by CEO Jeff Linnell, Formant is a monitoring and operations infrastructure for anyone who works with robots. Its platform has been in Beta and is already in use by a number of customers in the RaaS (robots-as-a-service) space. Formant is a monitoring and operations infrastructure for anyone who works with robots. Formant believes that more efficient cloud infrastructure can help unlock the shared potential of humans and robots.

“Robots are leaving the factory and adventuring into our world. They could use some guidance. This release facilitates this journey by enabling robot fleets to thrive through human observability and assistance,” said Jeff Linnell CEO of Formant.io.

The Formant platform is uniquely built to address the challenges robotics companies face when trying to move data to the cloud for analysis. It streams data automatically and intelligently handles challenging network environments. The data stream is enriched, indexed and annotated for searchability, shortening time-to-insight for business consumers and incident resolution for operational staff.

“It’s essentially a DVR for data… I can skip the ‘commercials’ and just get to the relevant data in seconds, “ said Anthony Jules co-founder, COO Robust.AI. This release further builds out Formant’s capabilities in the robot fleet monitoring, observability, and operations space. Formant’s platform is designed to help robots and humans work together efficiently.

“Formant’s analytics platform is a sales superweapon, allowing me to close deals backed by insights,” said Henrik Bennetsen, Co-founder and Chief Business Officer, Canvas.