Viam Launchpad aims to accelerate robotics deployments

Coming back from RoboBusiness and RobOpsCon, I have never felt more optimistic about the field of robotics, I mean physical AI. Billion-dollar valuations and disruptive technologies continue to outpace yesterday’s innovations at great speed.

At the same time, too many brilliant entrepreneurs languish in taking their ideas from the lab to the market. These startups, led by industry experts, are on a mission to automate their industries. However, they remain stuck in ROS purgatory, unable to turn pilots into revenue-generating robots.

In 2020, Eliot Horowitz set out to create a better way to build and deploy intelligent machines. Drawing on his experience as co-founder and chief technology officer of MongoDB, Horowitz created Viam, a universal software abstraction layer for building and deploying hardware systems across enterprise fleets, or, as the company describes it, “The Harness for Physical AI.”

“In the past, robotics startups needed years of research and development and had to build a huge amount of infrastructure to make a project more than a science experiment,” Horowitz said. “What we see with Viam is that a small team starting from scratch can prototype in weeks or months, iterate, deploy and capture real business with incredible speed by leveraging Viam’s tools and benefits for physical AI. We are incredibly excited to provide the ingredients needed to grow this new wave of robotics.”

Gambit gets a push into robotic kitchens

Since Viam’s launch, the platform has enabled numerous startups to launch and reach customers quickly, including Gambit, Tennibot, and Canyon Runner.

Horowitz and entrepreneur Nicole Maffeo co-founded Gambit. Now, Maffeo is bringing its computer vision-based kitchen guidance platform to a fully automated kitchen, complete with two robotic arms placed in the kitchen fan to stir and mix a variety of gourmet recipes.

Maffeo recently shared his experience working with Horowitz’s platform: “Collaborating with the Viam engineering team over the past two years has truly catapulted Gambit forward. By pairing robust enterprise-grade infrastructure with adaptable custom modules, the architecture allows our team to seamlessly move from initial hardware prototypes to real-world deployments. From telemetry and remote debugging to fleet management in field operations, Viam provides the essential building blocks that allow us to move at incredible speed.”

Viam Launchpad provides immersive launcher support

Now, Horowitz aims to leverage Maffeo’s expertise by creating Viam Launchpad. This intensive six-month program provides founders with the technical and business tools to take their concepts from napkin designs to commercial implementation.

As a consulting executive director of Launchpad, I can attest that the highlight of this incubator is not demo day, but installation day. This is possible because we fully immerse teams in Viam with usage credits, technical support and office space in the heart of New York City.

Unlike software, robotics founders need access to hardware, and Viam has one of the most robust robotics labs in the Northeast, complete with a farm of robotic arms. As a professional investor and author of A practical guide for startups in the era of robots and artificial intelligenceI also coach founders through a structured curriculum focused on creating early customer discovery feedback loops, refining go-to-market strategies, and leveraging a large network of mentors and investors.

RoboBuilt quickly prepares for commercial deployment

Moving from the Viam Launchpad, founders are pushed forward with a network of capital introductions, sales leads and, ultimately, purchase orders.

“Our ability to go from planning in a digital environment to physical robot actions in minutes, not days, is truly incredible,” said Launchpad member Alex Gray of indoor construction robotics company RoboBuilt. “Viam’s modules for rudimentary actions allow us to focus more quickly on our specific tasks and avoid getting bogged down in the basic configuration of robotic arm drivers and peripheral APIs.”

RoboBuilt co-founder Shean Rahman explained how the software and program are game-changers. “We previously worked with Isaac Sim. It’s an incredibly deep and thorough program,” he said. “However, much of the physics, visualizations, and other components are not as crucial to our workflow as they might be for other applications.”

“Viam has already outlined so many basic initialization steps that it allows us to get to our core problem more quickly,” Rahman added. “We look forward to leaving the incubator with a functioning commercial deployment in time for our seed funding round.”

F-Prime shares the state of robotics in RoboBusiness

At RoboBusiness last month, Sanjay Aggarwal of F-Prime Capital continued his annual tradition of presenting the “State of Robotics” report to attendees. Essentially, with so many mega rounds, the industry is very strong.

According to data from F-Prime, investments in automation this year have surpassed those of the last four years combined, topping $60 billion in just nine months. While most of this capital remains undiluted, the industry hopes that the IPOs of Unitree and Agility will spark a new spirit of exiting unicorns and provide much-needed liquidity, driving a flywheel of inventions for decades to come.

Avery Rosen, Viam’s chief of technical staff, asked Aggarwal, “Where do you still see opportunities for startups to innovate?”

The VC quickly responded: “Enabling technologies” and pointed to his graph showing that just $1.3 billion is being invested in software to accelerate the implementation of robotics. Avery, an integral part of the Viam Launchpad, noted that this is exactly what Horowitz aims to disrupt.

The overall market for enabling systems is expected to rise to more than $23 billion by 2031, part of a larger $78 billion robotics software market. Today, the industry is full of open source options, and large multinational vendors are rushing to fill the gap for seamless implementations.

However, despite significant investments from tech giants like Google with Intrinsic and Amazon with RoboMaker, wide-scale adoption remains elusive. AWS shut down RoboMaker last year after seven years of limited traction.

ROS still requires development time

The most adopted open source robotics framework remains Open Robotics’ Robot Operating System (ROS), with approximately 1.3 million monthly users. NVIDIA’s Isaac Sim robotics simulation platform is also gaining momentum, surpassing one million cumulative downloads this year.

However, downloads and developers do not necessarily translate into customer-facing implementations. Viam recently demonstrated how its platform builds on NVIDIA’s Isaac Sim and Cosmos technologies to connect synthetic data generation and AI model training with real-world applications. This more comprehensive approach, which combines hardware-agnostic software infrastructure with hands-on technical support, is helping to bridge the gap between simulation, prototype and implementation, a critical step toward making physical AI a commercial reality.

Next year, ROS will celebrate its 20th anniversary, thanks to the work of Morgan Quigley and his colleagues at Stanford, followed by Willow Garage, which first developed the software. Today the open source platform remains a collection of independently developed modules.

While Open Robotics has provided tremendous opportunities for robotics experts, for too long we have relied on ROS as the foundation for manufacturing robotics, pushing it to handle tasks it was never designed to tackle on its own. ROS 2 represents a big step forward from its predecessor, but the capital, time and resources needed to convert prototypes into enterprise-level deployments still hold the industry back, especially for developers without mechanical engineering resources.

Just as the iPhone and the App Store democratized mobile app development, Viam is helping usher in a similar moment for robotics, lowering the barriers to building and scaling hardware startups.

Over the past 15 years, accelerators have enabled disruptors to conquer markets from coast to coast, from YC in California to ERA in New York. While amazing companies have thrived, robotics requires a different approach—not just office space and equipment, but also deep technical and business enablement.

This is the thesis behind the Viam Launchpad: to enable a new generation of robotics founders with deep industry expertise to solve real problems through automation. These problem solvers are in a hurry and don’t have time to tinker with drivers, integrations, and software modules. They ask for a simpler way, a level of abstraction that allows them to focus on serving paying customers.

To find out more and sign up to the Viam Launchpad, click here.