BMW i Ventures announced an investment in Formant, a robotics data and operations platform. The $21-million round was led by BMW i Ventures, with participation from new investors Intel Capital, GS Futures, and previous investors, including SignalFire, Hillsven, Goodyear Ventures, Pelion Ventures, Holman, Ericsson, PICUS Capital, and Thursday Ventures.

Formant is a cloud platform that helps robotics companies easily deploy, scale, and manage their fleets.

This latest fundraising round comes after a year of record growth for Formant, during which revenuie increased by more than 500% year-over-year. The company will use the new funds to expand its hiring across all departments, introduce new products and features, and accelerate growth in 2023 and beyond.

Autonomous robotic systems have broken free from R&D departments and are now being deployed at scale to drive business outcomes and resilient operations. Their proliferation across mission-critical functions as well as support tasks for humans in various industries underscores the urgent need for seamless data management and orchestration across robotic endpoints. Formant is the operating system underpinning the future of the automated enterprise.

—Kasper Sage, Managing Partner at BMW i Ventures

In 2023, Formant expanded its focus to the enterprise, taking advantage of the accelerating adoption of intelligent robots across large organizations. Formant delivers a secure data platform to operate fleets of robots at any scale through a single pane of glass.

The company’s rapid growth has been supported by a flurry of new product introductions and integrations, including enterprise-grade tools and account management features to empower enterprise customers. Earlier this year, the company launched Theopolis, the AI language interface that enables non-technical users to interact directly with robot data and build visualizations inside Formant.