The 10 most innovative companies in robotics of 2023

Core robotics components, such as cameras, batteries and sensors—not to mention the AI routines animating those parts—are hurtling toward commodity status. But buying the right parts doesn’t ensure a viable business model. Instead, smart robotics startups are bringing a job-to-be-done mentality to the business, starting with identifying a need that businesses or consumers have struggled to “hire” satisfactory help for.

Formic, for instance, doesn’t make robots at all. Instead, it makes it easier for factories to adopt them by not only renting the robots, but also performing automated site inspections that reveal what work is best suited for robotic help. It’s a sound approach as manufacturers continue to find human workers to fill spots on production lines.

In much the same way, RC Mowers deploys remote-controlled, commercial-grade mowers to ease groundskeeping and reduce the injury risks to hard-to-find human landscapers. And Voliro’s flying, infrastructure-inspecting drones can not only see, but also touch such difficult-to-reach facilities as power lines and wind turbines.

Otto Motors has found a market in warehouses by providing robots, including a self-driving forklift, that are smart enough to stay out of the way of human employees and other robots. Seoul Robotics aims to make transportation more intelligent by upgrading existing infrastructure with sensing and computing so that vehicles don’t need their own machine-aided senses.

Starship, meanwhile, has kept on rolling where other robotic-delivery startups have stalled by focusing on the college campuses, where time-starved students are willing to hire out a faster fix for their hunger. On a more serious plane, Anduril saw the military potential of drones well before they became a key weapon in the Russo-Ukrainian War.

1. Formic

For serving up robots as a service

“X as a service” is a startup cliche, but Formic’s robots-as-a-service proposition involves more than just renting factory and warehouse robots to companies that don’t want or need to purchase their own. The company, which first launched its offering in just August 2021, starts by conducting an inspection of a client’s facilities—which can include a laser scan of the floor—to determine which processes could benefit from a rented robot. Formic started with automated robot offerings for welding, case packing, and injection molding from such robotics manufacturers as Universal Robots and Sourcelink Solutions. Formic builds tooling behind the scenes to enable that accelerated deployment, and it adds business-model innovation in offering these robots by the hour and charging only for performance. (Workers are typically moved to safer tasks.) In October 2022, Formic launched the SL20 Turnkey Palletizer, to address the injury-prone task of stacking cases onto a pallet. Compact Industries, a family-owned food co-packer of drink mixes and the like since 1963, added robotics for the first time with Formic’s SL20, doing so in less than half a day and, as that time would suggest, without having to reconfigure the factory floor. In December 2022, Formic announced Formic Flex, which lets manufacturers subscribe to robotic systems by the hour and swap among the company’s offerings as their needs change at no additional cost. The company has grown its revenue more than 10x year-over-year, and Formic’s robots do everything from making metal parts for car chassis and aluminum parts for planes to shredding lettuce used by Yum Brands restaurants, such as Taco Bell.

Read more about Formic, honored as No. 39 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2023.

2. Mercedes-Benz

For winning regulators’ trust with an autonomous-driving system

Mercedes’s Drive Pilot system—an array of cameras, computing, microphones, radars, and sensors built into its cars’ Driving Assistance Package—is a meaningful first step toward self-driving capability. Drive Pilot, which was approved for use in Germany in December 2021 and offered to S-Class and EQS electric-vehicle owners, provides “level 3” autonomy—meaning that the driver can take their eyes off the road and their hands off the wheel—on designated roads that have been mapped in high definition and while traveling under 40 mph. The company is seeking U.S. regulatory approval in California and Nevada in early 2023. In another industry first, at the end of November 2022, Germany authorized Drive Pilot at a garage at Stuttgart Airport, allowing cars to park themselves without a human inside.

3. Anduril

For seeing the military potential of drones earlier than many

Anduril continues to prove out its thesis that a tech industry-style approach to defense systems can create a viable alternative to legacy government contractors. The Irvine, California-based company, named after a magical sword in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, saw the military potential of drones well before they became a key weapon in 2022’s Russo-Ukrainian War. Anduril’s Lattice software, which won a patent in August 2022, autonomously detects, classifies, monitors, and then notifies an operator of a drone threat; if need be, the software can deploy a counter drone to collide into the aggressor and neutralize it. (Anduril has confirmed that it is being used by the Ukrainians in the conflict there.)

The company won a $968 million contract from the Department of Defense in January 2022 for its counter-drone systems for U.S. Special Operations Command. In February, it acquired an underwater drone company, Dive Technologies, and in May, won a $100 million contract to develop what’s known as an extra-large autonomous underwater vehicle with the Royal Australian Navy. By December, Anduril delivered the first “Ghost Shark” three months early. The device can be sent as much as 6,000 meters (more than 19,000 feet) deep in the ocean for as long as 10 days on an autonomous mission. Also in December 2022, the company raised another $1.5 billion to build what it believes is necessary for the national defense of the United States and its allies, such as its joint venture to create a modernized, autonomous-capable version of the U.S. Army’s Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

4. Seoul Robotics

For making transportation smarter, one intersection at a time

Autonomous-vehicle concepts typically operate on a basis of BYOB: Bring Your Own Brain. Seoul Robotics, however, aims to make not just future but even some current vehicles smarter by embedding sensing and computing into existing infrastructure and letting vehicles talk to that. Seoul’s Level 5 Control Tower creates a mesh network of computing technology and sensors on everything from traffic lights to roadside buildings; vehicles then communicate with a car’s built-in “vehicle-to everything” software to give it autonomous powers.

In January 2022, the company announced that BMW would use the Level 5 Control Tower solution to orchestrate vehicle movements at a major manufacturing facility near Munich. In September 2022, Seoul also connected Sensr, the 3D perception software at the heart of its offerings, to Lidar sensors built into highway infrastructure to release its Wrong-Way Driving Detection System in three U.S. states (California, Florida, and Tennessee) as well as Asian and European freeways. That same month, Seoul Robotics raised a $25 million Series B round of financing in order for the company to bring its vision for “autonomy through infrastructure” to such venues as trucking yards.

5. Starship Technologies

For rolling on while other delivery-robot companies reboot

While much-larger companies remain in a test phase with short-distance wheeled delivery drones—or, like FedEx, have scrapped those attempts outright—Starship’s six-wheeled, app-unlocked robots have long since become a common sight on dozens of college campuses from the University of Tennessee (where they debuted in March 2022) to the University of Tulsa (December 2022). In January 2022, the startup—which was first conceived in Estonia but is now headquartered in San Francisco—added the ability to verify the age of customers in the U.K., allowing its drones to answer the question, “Can somebody get me a beer?” The maker of the 22-inch-high bots that operate autonomously, albeit with human supervision, partnered with Grubhub in October 2022 to bring the popular delivery service to college students, starting with Fairfield, Kentucky, SMU, UNLV, and Wayne State. Starship has approximately 2,000 robots in service, and by the end of 2022, they had completed four million deliveries.

6. Voliro

For enabling infrastructure-inspection robots to look as well as touch

Voliro’s infrastructure-inspecting drones not only see but also touch, flying with appendages that allow for the physical inspection of such facilities as storage tanks, power lines, solar farms, and wind turbines. The Zurich-based firm’s Voliro T drone, introduced in 2022, can tilt while hovering to hug up against those structures before reaching out with one of a variety of sensor payloads that can be swapped out in the field, as if it were an autonomous flying Lego project. The company partnered with the U.S.-based inspection firm Constellation Clearsight to enlist the Voliro T drone to assess the structural integrity of American power plants.

7. Otto Motors

For bringing location-aware intelligence to factory robots

Getting out of the way is a fundamental skill in warehouses, but many of the robots sent into these facilities aren’t yet smart enough to stray from programmed paths. Otto Motors, a division of Kitchener, Ontario-based Clearpath Robotics, makes autonomous robots that can navigate those settings while transporting pallets. Its Otto Lifter, introduced in March 2022, is a self-driving forklift. Traditional forklifts are estimated to be responsible for up to 10% of workplace injuries in locations where a forklift is present. The Otto Lifter offers such features as dynamic path planning, pallet detection, and lane tending while being able to lift 2,640 pounds and reach up to two and a half feet while in autonomous mode. The Lifter is designed to integrate with other robotics systems as well as people. Otto Motors says that its products have clocked more than 3 million production hours without a safety incident, and 70% of its customers are among the world’s 500 largest companies by revenue, including GE and Toyota.

8. Attabotics

For three-dimensional thinking about robotic factories

While much of the effort to automate warehouses focuses on adding robots into existing spaces, Attabotics aims to replace the warehouse with a more compact and vertical structure built around robots that pick, place, and move parcels in three dimensions. The Calgary-based firm was a Fast Company Most Innovative Company in 2020 for its robotics system inspired by the structure of an ant colony; in September 2022, it introduced the Attabot 2022, technically its first full commercial release. The updated warehouse robotics platform was reengineered to handle larger bins and more weight, as well as perform in a variety of temperatures, which allows Attabotics to serve grocery-fulfillment customers. Just a month later, in October 2022, the company won a contract with the Department of Defense to provide its system for a prototype Marine Corps Logistics Command warehouse in Albany, Georgia. Attabotics then raised $71.7 million in November 2022 to fuel its expansion.

9. Turf Tank

For finding a lane for robots in the sports world

Turf Tank has found a market niche so narrow that it’s only a few inches wide: the lines on athletic fields. The company makes robotic line-marker paint machines, and in July 2022, the Danish startup introduced an updated version of the line-marking software that controls those devices. The app allows customers to drag and drop more than 120 regulation-standard layouts onto an image of their fields, customize them, or create their own. This eliminates the need to measure manually before setting loose the Turk Tank One battery-electric robot to follow the programmed path across the pitch. Turf Tank’s updated software also tells users how much paint will be used based on the paint nozzle and selected speed. Turf Tank’s robot can paint a full soccer field in under half an hour and a football field in less than three hours, a time savings of approximately 75% compared to manual line marking, while also eliminating fossil-fuel emissions and cutting paint consumption roughly in half. The company has grown its customer base from 288 in 2020 to 660 in 2021 to 1,150 in 2022. In the United States, customers include the Cincinnati Bengals and the University of Alabama.

10. RC Mowers

For tackling a job that’s often hot, hazardous, and in need of human workers