Figure AI

Figure AI Inc. was founded in May 2022 by Brett Adcock, a serial entrepreneur previously known for founding Vettery, a talent marketplace acquired by Adecco in 2018, and Archer Aviation, an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft company that went public in 2021. Adcock assembled an initial engineering team drawing from robotics and AI talent at Boston Dynamics, Tesla, and Apple, and personally invested USD 100 million as the company's seed funding. The founding thesis was direct: approximately 50% of global GDP is generated by human physical labour, and a general-purpose humanoid robot capable of performing that labour represents the largest commercial opportunity in the history of technology. Figure exited stealth mode in January 2023, and Figure 01 took its first steps in May 2023. The company raised USD 70 million in a Series A led by Parkway Venture Capital in May 2023.

In February 2024, Figure AI closed a landmark USD 675 million Series B at a USD 2.6 billion valuation. The round was backed by a consortium including Microsoft, NVIDIA, Intel Capital, Amazon's startup division, the OpenAI Startup Fund, and Jeff Bezos through Bezos Expeditions, representing one of the most strategically significant investor groups assembled for any humanoid robotics company at that time. Concurrent with the Series B, Figure AI announced a commercial agreement with BMW to deploy humanoid robots at the BMW Spartanburg plant in South Carolina, the first confirmed commercial humanoid robot deployment at a major automotive manufacturer. Figure 02 launched in August 2024 with substantially upgraded hardware and triple the compute of its predecessor, and was deployed at BMW's Spartanburg plant performing X3 body shop chassis assembly tasks in 10-hour daily shifts from early 2025. In February 2025, Figure AI ended its collaboration with OpenAI, stating that its internal AI team had surpassed what the collaboration could deliver, and pivoted to developing Helix, its proprietary vision-language-action model, entirely in-house.

In March 2025, Figure AI opened BotQ, a dedicated humanoid manufacturing facility in San Jose with a rated capacity of 12,000 robots per year, staffed in part by its own humanoid robots. In September 2025, Figure AI closed a Series C round exceeding USD 1 billion led by Parkway Venture Capital, with participation from Brookfield Asset Management, NVIDIA, Intel Capital, Macquarie Capital, Qualcomm, Salesforce, T-Mobile, and others, bringing the company's post-money valuation to USD 39 billion, a 15x increase from its Series B valuation of 18 months prior. Figure 03 was introduced in October 2025 as the company's first home-focused platform, named one of TIME magazine's Best Inventions of 2025. In January 2026, Helix 02 was released, expanding the model to whole-body functional autonomy. A Figure 03 unit appeared at the White House in March 2026 in an event featuring US First Lady Melania Trump, providing the company with significant public visibility. Brett Adcock has publicly stated a production target of 1 million robots per year in the medium term.

• Figure 01:
  A 1,680 mm, 60 kg bipedal humanoid with 41 DoF, 20 kg payload, 5-hour runtime, and cameras/LiDAR/tactile sensing. Developed in collaboration with OpenAI for natural language task reasoning and autonomous industrial task execution. Transitioned to legacy/discontinued status in August 2024 following the Figure 02 launch.
• Figure 02:
  A 1,680 mm, 70 kg bipedal humanoid with 35 DoF, 16-DoF hands carrying up to 25 kg, 2.25 kWh battery for 5-hour runtime, six RGB cameras, and dual NVIDIA GPU compute for 3x inference over Figure 01. Commercially deployed at BMW Spartanburg for automotive assembly. Figure AI's current primary commercial industrial platform.
• Figure 03:
  A 1,676 mm, 60 kg home-focused bipedal humanoid designed for mass production and domestic deployment. Features soft-goods exterior, wireless foot charging at 2 kW, 3g-sensitivity custom tactile fingertip sensors, palm cameras, 10 Gbps mmWave data offload, and 2.3 kWh battery. Powered entirely by the proprietary Helix 02VLA model. Named TIME Best Invention 2025.

• Helix VLA Model:
  Figure AI's fully proprietary end-to-end VLA model processes vision, language, and tactile inputs to output full-body coordinated physical actions in real time onboard, without cloud inference. Helix enables zero-shot manipulation of previously unseen objects and continuous skill learning from human observation.
• Vertical AI Integration:
  Figure AI designs its robots, actuators, compute architecture, and AI models entirely in-house, giving it control over the full stack from physical hardware through to the AI layer, a differentiation from peers relying on third-party AI platforms.
• Mass Manufacturing Capability via BotQ:
  The BotQ facility is designed and operated partly by Figure's own humanoid robots, enabling the company to demonstrate its own product in its own production workflow while scaling toward 12,000 units per year.
• Consumer Home Safety Engineering:
  Figure 03 introduces design choices specifically for domestic deployment that most industrial humanoid peers have not addressed, including UN38.3 battery certification, soft-goods coverings, foam pinch-point protection, and wireless charging, representing a genuine engineering commitment to the home market rather than a marketing pivot.
• Fleet-Scale Continuous Learning:
  The 10 Gbps mmWave data offload system in Figure 03 creates a closed-loop improvement cycle in which every deployed robot contributes real-world data to the Helix training pipeline daily, with improvements distributed back to the full fleet via OTA updates — a network-effect learning advantage that compounds with fleet scale.

Funding and Financial Position

Figure AI has raised approximately USD 1.9 billion across four rounds since its founding. The seed round was Brett Adcock's personal USD 100 million investment. The Series A raised USD 70 million in May 2023 led by Parkway Venture Capital at a USD 500 million valuation. The Series B raised USD 675 million in February 2024 at a USD 2.6 billion valuation. The Series C, closed in September 2025 and exceeding USD 1 billion, valued the company at USD 39 billion — a 15x increase from the Series B valuation in 18 months, and one of the most significant single-round valuation jumps in the history of the robotics industry. Projected 2025 revenue was cited by multiple sources at USD 100 million or more, primarily from BMW and reported UPS enterprise deployment agreements, marking a transition from research-stage to commercially generating company.

Revenue Model

Figure AI's current revenue model is enterprise-centric, structured around long-term commercial deployment agreements with manufacturing and logistics customers. Figure 02 is not publicly sold but is deployed under enterprise contracts, with estimated per-unit pricing in the range of USD 130,000 based on third-party reporting. Figure 03 is targeted at a consumer price of approximately USD 20,000, representing a future consumer hardware revenue stream that has not yet opened at scale. A potential AI-as-a-Service monetisation model for Helix updates has been discussed in investor and industry analysis but has not been officially announced by the company.

Customer and Deployment Base

BMW Group is Figure AI's primary confirmed commercial customer, with Figure 02 robots deployed at the BMW Spartanburg plant in South Carolina performing X3 body shop chassis assembly tasks in daily 10-hour shifts since early 2025. UPS has been reported as a second enterprise customer by multiple third-party sources, though this has not been officially confirmed by either party. The Brookfield Asset Management partnership provides deployment access to Brookfield's global portfolio of commercial, logistics, and residential properties for data collection and early Figure 03 deployment.

Strategic Partnerships and Collaborations

Microsoft, NVIDIA, Amazon, Intel, OpenAI (concluded 2025), Jeff Bezos, Qualcomm, Salesforce, T-Mobile, and Macquarie Capital are among the investor base, several of whom carry strategic as well as financial significance. BMW remains the primary commercial deployment partner. Brookfield Asset Management is both a Series C investor and a deployment and data partnership, providing access to over 100,000 residential units and extensive commercial properties for Helix pre-training data collection. The BotQ manufacturing facility itself operates partly as a proof-of-concept customer — Figure AI's own robots are employed in producing Figure AI's robots.

Intellectual Property

Figure AI's primary IP assets are the Helix VLA model (Helix 01 and Helix 02), the custom actuator and motor designs developed for each robot generation, the custom tactile fingertip sensors introduced in Figure 03, and the BotQ manufacturing process. Having terminated the OpenAI collaboration in February 2025 and building Helix entirely in-house, the company holds full ownership of its AI stack. Brett Adcock has described Figure's internal AI team as having surpassed what the OpenAI collaboration could deliver for embodied robotics, suggesting a material technology self-sufficiency claim.
Market Position and Competitive Advantage
Figure AI occupies the highest valuation of any pure-play humanoid robotics company globally as of September 2025 at USD 39 billion, above Figure AI's nearest peers including Boston Dynamics (private, owned by Hyundai), Agility Robotics (owned by Amazon), and AgiBot (Chinese, private). Its primary differentiation is the combination of a fully proprietary AI stack (Helix), a vertically integrated hardware design process, a real commercial deployment at scale (BMW), and an explicit consumer home market strategy backed by purpose-built hardware. The consumer focus with Figure 03 distinguishes it from the industrial-first strategies of Agility, Apptronik, and AgiBot. The USD 39 billion valuation, however, implies a market expectation of successful mass-market consumer deployment that has not yet been proven at scale.

Leadership and Team

Brett Adcock is Founder and CEO, and has been the sole public face of the company since founding. His prior exits include Vettery (acquired by Adecco) and Archer Aviation (NASDAQ: ACHR), establishing a track record of founding and scaling technology businesses through to liquidity events. The board includes Peter Welinder (formerly OpenAI), Jesse Coors-Blankenship, Gregg Hill, Grant Hosking, Lee Randaccio, Dana Berlin, Logan Berkowitz, and Colby Adcock, totalling nine active board members. The engineering team has been drawn heavily from Boston Dynamics, Tesla, and Apple, reflecting a hardware-first hiring strategy. Employee headcount is approximately 180 as of the time of this audit.

Awards and Recognition

Figure 03 named one of TIME magazine's Best Inventions of 2025. Figure 03 featured at White House event with US First Lady Melania Trump, March 2026. Figure 02 deployment at BMW Spartanburg cited widely as the first confirmed sustained commercial humanoid robot deployment at a major automotive manufacturer. Brett Adcock covered by The Wall Street Journal, The Information, IEEE Spectrum, and Financial Times as a benchmark case for the scaling of commercial humanoid robotics.

Risks and Challenges

Figure AI's USD 39 billion valuation rests heavily on investor expectations of successful mass-market consumer deployment of Figure 03, which as of this audit has not occurred at scale. The robot currently performs household tasks slowly and requires human supervision for tasks that deviate from training scenarios, a gap that Adcock has acknowledged publicly. In November 2025, Figure AI's former head of product safety sued the company, alleging termination following the raising of safety concerns related to the robot's strength capability — a material reputational and legal risk for a company explicitly targeting home deployment near people and children. The transition from enterprise to consumer revenue models involves a fundamentally different go-to-market motion, price point, and support infrastructure that Figure AI has not yet executed at scale. Competition is intensifying rapidly from both Chinese humanoid companies scaling production at lower price points and US peers including Agility Robotics and Apptronik with established industrial deployments.

Expansion and Outlook

Brett Adcock has stated a production target of scaling from thousands of units in 2025 to 1 million per year in the medium term. The BotQ facility currently operates at 12,000 units per year and is designed for further scale-up. The Brookfield partnership provides a pre-commercial consumer deployment environment across more than 100,000 residential units to generate diverse training data for Helix before general consumer release. Consumer pre-orders are expected but had not opened as of the time of this audit. The reported UPS logistics deployment, if confirmed, would represent Figure AI's expansion beyond automotive manufacturing into its second major vertical. International market entry plans have not been publicly detailed beyond the US-centric deployment roadmap.