Formic has opened a 13,000-square-foot facility in Oakland, California, that will serve as its first West Coast location and support the company’s expansion into humanoid robotics and physical AI.
The facility at 936 61st St. will function as a robot factory and research and development center. Formic plans to use the site for humanoid development while expanding deployments of its existing industrial automation systems with manufacturers in the region.
The Oakland location follows Formic’s expansion into a 53,000-square-foot production facility in Bolingbrook, Illinois, in June. The company said it plans further geographic expansion beyond its Midwest and West Coast operations.
Formic provides industrial automation through a Robots-as-a-Service model under which manufacturers pay a monthly fee rather than purchasing the equipment upfront. Its deployed systems perform applications including palletizing and machine tending, with Formic handling deployment and ongoing maintenance.
The company is now seeking to apply the same service model to humanoid robots. Formic said the Oakland operation will focus on using humanoids for more flexible and variable manufacturing tasks than those typically handled by dedicated industrial automation systems.
“Humanoids change the calculus for what’s automatable,” Formic COO Danijel Lolic said. “We’ve spent years proving the Robots-as-a-Service model works for highly complex, high-volume, specialized tasks. Oakland is where we start applying that same deployment excellence to more flexible, dynamic, high-variability tasks.”
Data generated by Formic’s industrial robots and future humanoid deployments will feed into Cortex and Core, the company’s proprietary AI systems used for scoping automation projects, deployment and real-time robot operation.
Formic founder and CEO Saman Farid said the Oakland location gives the company access to robotics expertise and manufacturers adopting automation. The company also cited the presence of other physical AI projects in the Bay Area, including Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot program and Amazon operations in the region.
Formic was founded in 2020 and supplies automation to U.S. manufacturers. Under its service model, customers receive robotic systems without an upfront capital expenditure, with deployment, maintenance and contracted production performance included in a monthly fee.
