Figure AI

Figure AI is an American humanoid-robotics company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, founded in May 2022 by Brett Adcock, the serial entrepreneur whose prior companies are Vettery (the recruiting marketplace acquired by Adecco for approximately $100 million in 2018) and Archer Aviation (the eVTOL aircraft company that Adcock co-founded in 2018 and that listed on NYSE through a SPAC merger in 2021). Figure AI develops the Figure 02 bipedal humanoid robot for industrial deployment and the Helix vision-language-action (VLA) foundation model that powers the robot's perception and policy stack. The company has commercial-deployment partnerships including BMW (announced January 2024 for the BMW Spartanburg plant, the company's first major automotive-OEM customer) and adjacent industrial partners. Figure AI has raised over $1.5 billion in cumulative private capital with a reported $39.5 billion valuation as of the February 2025 Series C, making it one of the most highly valued private humanoid-robotics organizations globally and a defining test of the post-2022 humanoid-robotics commercial thesis. As of April 2026, Figure AI is the principal industrial-humanoid-robotics Insurgent globally alongside Tesla Optimus (Tesla AI).

At a glance

• Founded: May 2022 in Sunnyvale, California, by Brett Adcock.
• Status: Private. Series C in February 2025 at reported $39.5 billion valuation.
• Funding: Approximately $1.5 billion-plus cumulative private capital. Series B of $675 million (February 2024) at $2.6 billion valuation led by Microsoft and the OpenAI Startup Fund with NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions), Intel Capital, and ARK Invest participating. Series C closed February 2025 at the reported $39.5 billion valuation with continued strategic-investor participation.
• CEO: Brett Adcock, Founder and Chief Executive Officer. Serial entrepreneur (Vettery 2013 to 2018, Archer Aviation 2018 to 2022 as Founder and CEO; departed Archer to start Figure).
• Other notable leadership: Senior research-and-engineering leadership recruited from Tesla, Boston Dynamics, Apple (the former Apple Special Projects Group with members previously on the Apple Car program), Google, and adjacent robotics-and-AI organizations.
• Open weights: No. Figure AI's models, including the Helix vision-language-action foundation model, are closed.
• Flagship products: Figure 02 (the principal bipedal humanoid robot for industrial deployment, released August 2024); the Helix vision-language-action foundation model (released February 2025); the Figure 01 earlier prototype generation. Active commercial deployment at BMW Spartanburg under the January 2024 partnership.

Origins

Figure AI was founded in May 2022 in Sunnyvale, California, by Brett Adcock immediately after his departure from Archer Aviation. Adcock had spent the prior decade as a serial entrepreneur in non-AI sectors: Vettery (the AI-augmented recruiting marketplace that Adcock founded in 2013 and sold to Adecco in 2018 for approximately $100 million) and Archer Aviation (the electric vertical-take-off-and-landing aircraft company that he co-founded in 2018 with Adam Goldstein and that listed on the NYSE through a SPAC merger in 2021). Adcock departed Archer Aviation in early 2022 to focus on Figure AI, with the founding thesis that the post-ChatGPT generative-AI wave had produced AI capabilities sufficient to make general-purpose humanoid robots commercially viable for the first time, and that the timing favored a rapid-build approach over the longer-running mechanical-engineering-first approaches that older humanoid-robotics organizations had pursued.

The 2022 to 2023 period built Figure's product foundation rapidly. The company's stated approach combined aggressive engineering recruiting (with named hires from Tesla, Boston Dynamics, Apple's former Special Projects Group, and adjacent robotics organizations) with an iteration-velocity-first product strategy. The Figure 01 prototype was demonstrated publicly through 2023, and the January 2024 announcement of a commercial deployment partnership with BMW for the BMW Spartanburg plant in South Carolina was the company's first major industrial customer disclosure.

The February 2024 Series B of $675 million at $2.6 billion valuation was led by Microsoft and the OpenAI Startup Fund, with NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions), Intel Capital, ARK Invest, Parkway Venture Capital, and Align Ventures participating. The Microsoft-and-OpenAI lead was structurally distinctive — Microsoft and OpenAI were among the more strategic AI-aligned investors in humanoid robotics — and the round was characterized in industry coverage as a defining capital event for the post-2022 humanoid-robotics commercial thesis.

The August 2024 Figure 02 release introduced the second-generation Figure hardware, with substantial improvements including 16 degrees of freedom in the hands, integrated speech-and-vision, and reportedly more than 3x the on-board compute of Figure 01. The February 2025 Helix vision-language-action foundation model release positioned Figure's AI capability with a unified VLA architecture handling perception, language understanding, and motor-policy execution within a single neural network. The same period brought the Series C at the reported $39.5 billion valuation, with continued strategic-investor participation.

The 2025 to 2026 period has continued BMW deployment alongside additional commercial-customer announcements (industry coverage has reported logistics and warehouse partnerships beyond BMW). The company has reported continued Figure 02 production scaling and the early-stage development of a third-generation hardware platform.

Mission and strategy

Figure AI's stated mission is to build general-purpose humanoid robots for industrial deployment, with explicit focus on manufacturing, logistics, and other commercial-industrial use cases as the principal commercial path. The strategy combines three threads. First, the Figure hardware product line, with rapid iteration cadence (Figure 01 in 2023, Figure 02 in 2024, and continued generations under development) and explicit positioning as a vertically integrated humanoid robot rather than a software-only platform layer. Second, the Helix vision-language-action foundation model, providing the AI capability that makes the hardware useful and that the company is developing in-house rather than depending on external API providers. Third, deep commercial-partnership cooperation with industrial customers, with BMW Spartanburg as the principal published example and with the per-customer engagement structured to produce both deployment data and commercial revenue.

The competitive premise is that humanoid-robotics has reached an inflection point where AI capability and hardware affordability have converged sufficiently to make commercial industrial deployment viable, that the rapid-iteration approach to hardware-and-AI development can outpace the longer-running but more conservative engineering organizations (Boston Dynamics, Honda Research Institute, the older humanoid-robotics cohort), and that vertical integration of hardware-and-AI produces a structurally better economics than the AI-software-platform alternative pursued by Physical Intelligence and Skild AI.

Models and products

• Figure 02. The principal commercial product. Bipedal humanoid robot for industrial deployment. Released August 2024. 16 degrees of freedom in the hands, integrated speech-and-vision, multi-day battery life, and reportedly more than 3x on-board compute compared to Figure 01.
• Helix vision-language-action foundation model. Released February 2025. End-to-end neural network handling perception, language understanding, and motor-policy execution within a unified architecture.
• Figure 01. Earlier prototype generation. Demonstrated publicly through 2023 and early 2024.
• BMW Spartanburg deployment. First commercial deployment customer; announced January 2024 with active deployment through 2025 to 2026.

Distribution channels are direct enterprise partnerships with industrial customers. Figure has not pursued a consumer-humanoid commercial path, in contrast to 1X's NEO consumer-humanoid positioning.

Benchmarks and standing

Figure AI is not evaluated against horizontal AI benchmarks because the company's commercial output is the integrated robot rather than a standalone foundation model. The company's standing is measured through commercial-deployment metrics (number of robots deployed, customer count, hours of autonomous operation), the public-demonstration cadence (which has been substantially higher than peer humanoid-robotics organizations through 2024 to 2025), and the comparative valuation against peer humanoid-robotics Insurgents.

Industry coverage has consistently characterized Figure AI as one of the structurally consequential humanoid-robotics Insurgents of the post-2022 cohort, with the Microsoft-and-OpenAI strategic-investor relationship, the BMW commercial-deployment partnership, and the rapid product-iteration cadence as principal validating data points. The February 2025 $39.5 billion valuation is approximately 15x Figure's February 2024 valuation, reflecting both the broader humanoid-robotics commercial inflection and Figure's specific competitive positioning.

Leadership

As of April 2026, Figure AI's senior leadership includes:

• Brett Adcock, Founder and Chief Executive Officer.
• Senior research-and-engineering leadership recruited from Tesla, Boston Dynamics, Apple's former Special Projects Group, Google, and adjacent robotics-and-AI organizations.

Industry coverage has reported the engineering organization growing from approximately 80 to over 300 employees through 2024 to 2025.

Funding and backers

• Seed and earlier rounds (2022 to 2023): Approximately $100 million-plus across earlier rounds with strategic and venture investors.
• Series B (February 2024): $675 million at $2.6 billion valuation led by Microsoft and the OpenAI Startup Fund with NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos (Bezos Expeditions), Intel Capital, ARK Invest, Parkway Venture Capital, and Align Ventures participating.
• Series C (February 2025): Reported at $39.5 billion valuation. Strategic investors continued participation; specific lead investor not publicly disclosed in detail at time of announcement.
• Cumulative capital exceeds $1.5 billion as of April 2026.

Industry position

Figure AI occupies a defining position among humanoid-robotics Insurgents, with the multi-billion-dollar capital base, the tens-of-billions-of-dollars valuation, the BMW commercial-deployment partnership, the in-house Helix vision-language-action foundation model, and the rapid product-iteration cadence. Industry coverage has consistently characterized Figure as one of the two principal industrial-humanoid-robotics Insurgents globally alongside Tesla Optimus.

The structural risks are three. First, the $39.5 billion valuation implies commercial-deployment expectations (production volume, customer count, revenue) that the company has not yet publicly demonstrated meeting. Second, Tesla Optimus has the structural advantage of internal-deployment-first commercialization (Tesla can deploy Optimus in its own manufacturing operations without external customer commitment), which provides a learning-loop that Figure depends on external customers for. Third, the broader humanoid-robotics commercial thesis remains unproven at production scale — whether industrial customers will adopt humanoid robots at the price points and reliability levels that the multi-billion-dollar valuation requires is the principal commercial question.

Competitive landscape

• Tesla Optimus (Tesla AI). Direct industrial-humanoid-robotics competitor. Tesla's vertically integrated hardware-and-AI approach, combined with the captive Tesla manufacturing deployment surface, structurally distinguishes Optimus from Figure.
• 1X. Norwegian-American humanoid-robotics peer with consumer-and-household commercial focus rather than industrial. Different commercial positioning.
• Boston Dynamics (Hyundai-owned). Robotics incumbent with longer-running engineering history but slower commercial humanoid-robotics path. Atlas (the Boston Dynamics humanoid) was relaunched in electric form in April 2024.
• Apptronik, Agility Robotics, Sanctuary AI. US humanoid-robotics peers with adjacent commercial-segment focus.
• Unitree, Fourier Intelligence, Agibot. Chinese humanoid-robotics competitors with substantially lower price points.
• Physical Intelligence, Skild AI. Robotics-AI foundation-model peers; potential platform-layer alternatives but currently more competitive than complementary given Figure's in-house Helix model.
• NVIDIA Research GR00T. Strategic-and-research peer; NVIDIA is also a Figure investor.

Outlook

• Continued Figure 02 production scaling and BMW Spartanburg deployment expansion through 2026 to 2027.
• Additional commercial-customer announcements beyond BMW.
• Helix vision-language-action foundation-model iteration and any successor model release.
• The competitive dynamic with Tesla Optimus as both organizations move toward production-scale industrial deployment.
• Whether the $39.5 billion valuation will be sustained, raised, or revised based on commercial-deployment progress.

Sources

• Figure AI official site. Product reference.
• Brett Adcock LinkedIn. Founder profile.
• Series B announcement (February 2024). Funding-history reference.
• BMW Spartanburg partnership announcement (January 2024). Commercial-customer reference.
• Helix vision-language-action announcement (February 2025). VLA foundation-model reference.