When I visited Viam’s offices in Manhattan late last year, two things struck me. First, there is a great view of Lincoln Center. Now that the weather is warming up and they’re starting to do all-ages movie screenings, you can probably just hang out and watch it all from the other side of 9th Avenue.
Second, the company has 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 offerings. In October, Viam announced a public beta of its product and has been working to get the platform in as many hands as possible, from meetups to this video it co-produced with our friend Simone Giertz. Existing customers include Dexai Robotics, HAX, Newlab and Sol Robotics.
Viam’s platform is generally available today, providing support from the prototyping phase to fleet management.
“With innovation held back by the high time and resource costs of development, we felt there was a significant opportunity to do something incredibly important,” said co-founder and CEO Eliot Horowitz 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 the barriers of working with robotics.”
Fleet management is a nut that much of the competition is currently trying to crack, giving robotics customers the ability to deploy and monitor these systems at scale. Interoperability has also been a bit of a bugbear. Many robotics vendors offer their own version of fleet management, although these are often restrictive, 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 addresses the production and security side of the equation.
Viam continues to offer a free tier and adds three different premium packages for additional support.