The History of Figure AI

01Founding

Figure's founder, Brett Adcock, had already built two companies before humanoid robots. He co-founded the hiring marketplace Vettery in 2012–2013, which the Adecco Group acquired in February 2018 for a price reported at roughly $100–110 million depending on the source. He then co-founded electric-aircraft company Archer Aviation in October 2018, which went public via SPAC merger in February 2021 at a reported valuation of about $2.7 billion. Adcock left Archer in May 2022 and founded Figure the same month, initially based in Sunnyvale, California.

Rather than raise venture capital first, Adcock self-funded Figure's earliest work with roughly $100 million of his own money from the Vettery and Archer proceeds — he's said deep-tech hardware was a hard sell to traditional VCs at the time. The early team was recruited from Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, Tesla, Rivian, Apple, Google DeepMind, and Toyota Research Institute, including founding CTO Jerry Pratt, a legged-robotics researcher formerly of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. Figure emerged from stealth on March 2, 2023, unveiling the Figure 01 prototype and describing its goal as building "the world's first commercially viable general purpose humanoid robot."

02Funding

Figure's outside funding started modestly relative to where it ended up. A $70 million Series A closed in May 2023, led by Parkway Venture Capital with Adcock himself putting in $20 million, at a $500 million post-money valuation. The round that changed Figure's trajectory came nine months later: a $675 million Series B in February 2024, backed by Microsoft, the OpenAI Startup Fund, Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, Intel Capital, and Amazon among others, valuing the company at $2.6 billion and coming bundled with the OpenAI model-development partnership discussed below.

Figure's Series C, announced September 16, 2025, raised more than $1 billion at a $39 billion post-money valuation — roughly 15 times the Series B valuation in a year and a half — led again by Parkway Venture Capital with Brookfield Asset Management, Nvidia, Macquarie Capital, Salesforce, and T-Mobile Ventures participating. Figure's own release described the company as having raised "nearly $2 billion total" by that point; that figure is worth flagging against the earlier seed-stage figure of "$675 million raised" sometimes cited in press shorthand, which actually describes only the Series B round, not Figure's cumulative total. Adcock has said he retains roughly a 50% ownership stake in the company, and Figure has sent cease-and-desist letters to brokers offering to sell its shares on unauthorized secondary markets.

03The product line

Figure's hardware has moved through three generations in under three years. Figure 01 (2023) stood 1.68m tall and weighed 60kg, walking with external gantry support in its earliest demos before Figure released dynamic, unsupported walking footage later that year. Figure 02, unveiled in August 2024, kept the same height but added a larger onboard battery (roughly 5 hours of runtime), integrated internal cabling, and six onboard cameras — this was the generation BMW put to work on its Spartanburg, South Carolina line.

Figure 03, unveiled October 9, 2025, is 9% lighter than Figure 02 at 60kg, with roughly 16 hours of battery life, palm cameras embedded in each hand, fingertip tactile sensors sensitive to forces as low as 3 grams, and wireless inductive charging. Time named it one of its Best Inventions of 2025. Figure has said it's targeting a consumer price under $20,000, positioning Figure 03 as the generation meant to eventually reach homes as well as factories — though as of this writing that home version isn't yet for sale.

04Helix and the OpenAI partnership

Figure's February 2024 Series B came bundled with a model-development partnership with OpenAI, using Microsoft Azure for infrastructure. It didn't last long: by early 2025, Figure had ended the collaboration, with Adcock saying the partnership delivered "very little" value, that it was hard to get OpenAI's team into the office for demos, and that OpenAI's own ambitions to build humanoids in-house complicated the relationship. Figure announced its in-house replacement the same month — Helix, a vision-language-action model built as two networks working together: a 7-billion-parameter model for scene and language understanding paired with an 80-million-parameter fast model for continuous whole-body control. Figure says Helix was the first VLA model shown running two robots simultaneously on a shared long-horizon task involving objects neither robot had seen in training, using roughly 500 hours of training data.

Figure extended the same approach in January 2026 with Helix 02, replacing what Figure describes as 109,504 lines of hand-engineered C++ control code with a single learned network — Figure calls it "System 0" — operating directly from camera input to every actuator. Figure's demo showed a robot autonomously unloading and reloading a dishwasher across a full kitchen in a 61-action, four-minute sequence with no resets or teleoperation, which Figure describes as the longest continuous autonomous task shown by a humanoid to date.

05Working at BMW

Figure's most concrete deployment has been at BMW's Spartanburg, South Carolina plant — BMW's only US manufacturing site — where Figure signed a robotics-as-a-service agreement announced in January 2024. Figure 02 units worked the body shop there; by Figure's own account, they supported production of more than 30,000 BMW X3 vehicles across an 11-month deployment, running 10-hour shifts on weekdays and loading more than 90,000 parts. That pilot has since given way to Figure 03 units on a logistics and parts-sequencing role at the same plant, with BMW separately announcing its first humanoid deployment in Europe at its Leipzig, Germany facility.

Figure's fleet grew quickly through 2026: the company had almost no operating robots at the start of 2025, crossed 100 units by the end of that year, and by late June 2026 Adcock said on social media that Figure's robot fleet — roughly 740 units — had for the first time outnumbered its own human employees, then numbering somewhere between about 600 and 660 depending on the tracker consulted. In May 2026, Figure livestreamed a 10-hour "human vs. robot" package-sorting contest in which a human intern narrowly beat Figure 03 on throughput (12,924 packages to the robot's 12,732, or about 98.5% of the human's pace) before fatigue set in for the human competitor; over a longer continuous livestream, Figure said its robots sorted more than 249,000 packages across 200 hours of operation.

That fleet growth is backed by BotQ, the dedicated manufacturing facility Figure announced in March 2025, where Figure says its own humanoids help build more of themselves. Figure has said BotQ's first-generation line can produce up to 12,000 robots a year, with a longer-term goal of scaling to 100,000 robots and 3 million actuators annually within four years.

06Safety and the teleoperation debate

Figure's growth hasn't come without public friction. Founding CTO Jerry Pratt left the company in mid-2024 — after roughly two years — to co-found rival humanoid startup Persona AI, citing family relocation considerations rather than a dispute with Figure. More seriously, in November 2025 Robert Gruendel, a robot-safety engineer Figure had employed as its head of product safety, sued the company in federal court alleging he was fired in retaliation for warning executives that a robot's grip force measured more than twice what's needed to fracture an adult human skull, and that a robot had gashed a steel refrigerator door during a malfunction. Figure has said Gruendel was terminated for poor performance and has called the allegations false.

Figure has also been an outspoken voice in a broader industry debate over how much of the humanoid sector's demo footage is genuinely autonomous versus teleoperated by a hidden human operator. Adcock has repeatedly and publicly accused rival companies — by name, including 1X — of presenting teleoperated demonstrations as autonomous, while Figure has faced its own scrutiny after observers noted Figure robots gesturing toward their own heads during livestreamed work, a motion historically associated with hidden teleoperation elsewhere in the industry; Adcock has attributed the gesture to Helix 02's arm-clearing behavior rather than a human operator. Separately, roboticist Rodney Brooks — a co-founder of iRobot — has publicly called the video-based dexterity-learning approach used by Figure and others "pure fantasy thinking," arguing it won't scale to mass production.

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