FIGURE AI

Brett Adcock started Figure in 2022 with a simple, insane goal. Build a general-purpose humanoid robot that can do the physical work humans do not want to do.

Adcock was not a robotics guy by training. He had founded Vettery, a hiring marketplace he sold for about $100 million, and Archer Aviation, an electric aircraft company that went public.

He self-funded Figure's early days and recruited engineers from Boston Dynamics, Tesla, and Apple. The pitch was that AI had finally gotten good enough to give robots a brain.

Figure does not sell to consumers. The plan is to rent or sell humanoid robots to companies that need physical labor.

Think warehouses, factories, and logistics, where jobs are hard to fill. A robot that can be told what to do in plain English and then do it would be worth a lot to a manufacturer short on workers.

Figure signed a deal with BMW to test its robots on a real production line. The money, eventually, comes from charging per robot or per hour of work.

Figure 01 was the company's first humanoid robot, a two-legged machine roughly the size of an adult. Figure 02 followed as a more refined version with better hands, cameras, and battery life.

Helix is Figure's own AI system that lets the robots see, understand spoken commands, and control their bodies. Together they are meant to be a worker you can instruct like a person.

Figure's strategy is speed and star power. Adcock raised a giant war chest early so the company could hire the best robotics and AI people fast.

He partnered with OpenAI to give the robots language and reasoning, then later built an in-house AI model called Helix to control them. He also markets relentlessly.

Figure posts polished demo videos of its robots making coffee and sorting packages. The videos rack up millions of views and keep the funding flowing.

Humanoid robots are the graveyard of overpromising. They are expensive, hard to make reliable, and prone to looking great in a demo and useless in the real world.

Figure has to prove its robots can work a full shift without breaking or needing a human babysitter. It also faces serious competition.

Tesla's Optimus, Boston Dynamics, and a wave of Chinese firms are all chasing the same dream. Burning hundreds of millions a year, Figure needs real deployments soon.

The 2024 round read like an AI all-star list. Microsoft, Nvidia, and the OpenAI Startup Fund all put money in, alongside Jeff Bezos through his personal fund and Intel Capital.

Parkway Venture Capital led the earlier Series A. The $675 million raise valued Figure at $2.6 billion, which is enormous for a company with no revenue and robots still in testing.

Reports in 2025 suggested Figure was raising an even larger round at a far higher valuation.