Formic raises $50M to scale general-purpose robots across US factories

Formic, a Chicago company that rents out robots to factories, has raised $50M in growth capital. The package combines a Series B led by Mercato Partners with participation from Light Ray Ventures, Lightscape Partners and Citigroup, plus debt from S2G Investments. The split between equity and debt was not broken out. Formic says its machines operate in more than 100 facilities across over 30 states and have logged 750,000 production hours at 99.6% uptime. The company describes its shift from task-specific automation toward general-purpose robotics, a move that depends on machines working reliably on factory floors. Its raise lands during a busy week for physical AI, which also saw Tractian close a $130M Series D at a $1.4B valuation and Enact Intelligence launch with $30M in pre-seed funding. For founders building hardware, the Formic structure is a useful reference. Pairing a venture round with fleet-level debt can fund robots that customers rent, since the machines themselves carry the asset base. Deployment metrics like uptime and production hours give investors a concrete basis for judging traction.