When I visited Viam’s Manhattan offices late last year, I was struck by two things. First, there’s a killer view of Lincoln Center. As the weather is getting warmer and they’re starting to do those all-ages outdoor movie screenings, you can probably just hang out up there and watch the whole thing from the other side of 9th Avenue.
Second, the firm set up quite a bit of space in their well-appointed 54,000-square-foot office for startups, developers and the like to work with their robotics software offering. In October, Viam announced a public beta of its product and has been working to get the platform into as many hands as possible, from meetups to this video it co-produced with our buddy Simone Giertz. Existing customers include Dexai Robotics, HAX, Newlab and Sol Robotics.
Viam’s platform hits general availability today, providing support from the prototyping stage to fleet management.
“With innovation slowed down by the high time and resource costs for development, we felt that there was a significant opportunity to do something incredibly important,” co-founder and CEO Eliot Horowitz said in a release. “Robotics can help improve so many industries, from agriculture to food service, to medicine and climate solutions, but we need to break down barriers of working with robotics.”
Fleet management is a nut a lot of the competition is attempting to crack at the moment, offering robotics customers the ability to deploy and monitor these systems at scale. Interoperability has been a bit of a bugbear as well. Many robotics providers offer their own version of fleet management, though these tend to be limiting, with exclusive support for first-party hardware.
One of the things that makes Viam’s offering relatively unique in this world is the company’s push to be a kind of one-stop shop that also includes a focus on the production and security sides of the equation.
Viam is continuing to offer a free tier, while adding three different premium packages for additional support.
