Since we last spoke, Viam isn’t exactly spinning off, according to founder and CEO Eliot Horowitz — it’s more of a “rebrand.” About six months ago, the Manhattan-based startup made a concerted effort to broaden its focus. The development platform previously focused its reach on robotics companies. It’s a large and fast-growing category, but Horowitz explains that the company’s vision is bigger.
“The platform has always been — and always will be — for a very wide range of things, including robotics, including IoT and smart homes, industrial automation and all these things that have sensors and actuators and compute,” the executive says at TechCrunch. “At some point over the summer, we realized that when we were emailing or talking to people, when they saw the robotics on our homepage, it basically sent them into a frenzy. They said, “we’re not a robotics company — we do food processing, we do PLC automation, we make boats, we’re not robots.”
Further complicating messaging was the fact that — while the company is simply called “Viam” — its various social media platforms are “Viam Robotics,” due to the fact that it couldn’t secure the four-letter word. The company also spent much of its initial outreach efforts focusing on robotics. Viam’s large office overlooking New York’s Lincoln Center features a lab space where members of the local robotics community are invited to use its platform to develop automation applications.
The rebranding involved shuffling demos and focusing on new applications beyond robotics. The list includes verticals like security and shipping — the latter hits particularly close to home, as he speaks to me via Zoom from the bridge of his boat. He adds that the company has been integrated into some large business organizations, but Viam is not yet at a point where it can reveal names.
Certainly the interest remains from the side of investors. Viam this week announced a $45 million series round, with Union Square Ventures and Battery Ventures. The latest round brings the company’s total funding to $87 million. Viam says the funding will go towards R&D and boosting commercial business development. Horowitz tells me that Viam is also actively expanding its 100-person headcount.
He admits the company may still have a bit of a messaging problem, however, when it comes to defining a pithier elevator pitch to describe exactly what Viam’s software does nearly a year after its commercial launch.
“I wouldn’t say we don’t have the best answer,” he confesses. “When people ask me what I do and what [Viam’s software] does, I usually use an example from their life. For example, has your HVAC ever broken down? How do you find your coffee maker? If you know someone for a minute, you know something in their life where the software/hardware interface is bad. We are a platform that lives at the intersection of real world hardware and software and the cloud and machine learning. There is no such thing as us. There is no comparison”.
