Figure AI: Company Profile

Founding

Figure was founded in 2022 by Brett Adcock, who remains CEO and is the company's defining feature as much as any piece of hardware. Adcock is a serial founder rather than a roboticist: he built and sold the recruiting marketplace Vettery, then founded Archer Aviation, the electric air-taxi company he took public via SPAC in 2021. He seeded Figure with $20 million of his own money and has run it on an unusually compressed schedule — from incorporation to a walking prototype in under a year.

The premise was narrower than it sounds. Adcock's argument was not that humanoids are elegant, but that the world is already built for a human shape — stairs, door handles, tote bins, vehicle cabs — so a general-purpose robot that fits that shape needs no new factories or retrofitted workplaces to be useful. Everything else about the company follows from taking that literally.

Country and Headquarters

Figure AI is a United States company, now headquartered in San Jose, California, having started out in nearby Sunnyvale. The move reflects what it became: the current site houses not only engineering but BotQ, the company's own robot factory, on the same campus.

Leadership

Brett Adcock is founder and CEO. Jerry Pratt is CTO, and his arrival mattered more than most executive hires in this field: Pratt spent decades at the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition working on bipedal walking and led the team that placed second in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, which is to say he brought exactly the legged-locomotion depth a founder from aviation and recruiting did not have.

Figure's engineering bench was assembled by hiring aggressively out of Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Apple and Google DeepMind rather than by acquiring companies — a deliberate contrast with Boston Dynamics' university-spinout lineage or Agility's Oregon State roots.

Company Size and Funding

Figure employs roughly 600 people, and by mid-2026 had more robots than staff — around 740 — which is a statistic worth sitting with, since it is the point at which a robotics company starts being a manufacturer rather than a laboratory.

The funding history is steep even by the standards of this sector:

• Seed, May 2023 — $70 million. $20 million of it Adcock's own, alongside Parkway Venture Capital.
• Series B, February 2024 — $675 million at a $2.6 billion valuation. Jeff Bezos, Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel, Amazon and OpenAI.
• Series C, September 2025 — over $1 billion at a $39 billion valuation. Led by Parkway, with Brookfield, Nvidia, Intel, Macquarie, Qualcomm, Salesforce and T-Mobile Ventures.

That last step — from $2.6 billion to $39 billion in nineteen months — makes Figure the most richly valued pure-play humanoid company in the world, and it happened almost entirely on the strength of demonstrated capability rather than revenue. It is the clearest single example of how much of this industry is currently priced on expectation. Figure has also committed to spending upwards of $3.5 billion on Nvidia GPUs over the coming year, which tells you where the capital is going.

Development Directions and Products

Three generations in four years, each a visible change of intent rather than an iteration:

• Figure 01 (2022) — a prototype with external cabling, built to prove the company could make a humanoid walk at all.
• Figure 02 (August 2024) — cabling routed internally, battery moved into the torso, six RGB cameras, five-fingered hands with 16 degrees of freedom, 25 kg payload, and triple the onboard compute. The first version that looked like a product.
• Figure 03 (October 2025) — about 5½ feet and 61 kg, with 60 degrees of freedom and 20 per hand, cameras in the palms, double the frame rate and a 60% wider field of view. Its tactile sensors register forces as small as 3 grams. Soft, washable textiles replaced exposed machined parts and the docking cable gave way to a wireless charging pad — changes that only make sense if you intend the robot to end up in a home, not just a warehouse.

Helix, and the decision to leave OpenAI

Figure partnered with OpenAI in February 2024 and ended the arrangement roughly a year later, in February 2025. Adcock's stated reasoning is the most interesting thing Figure has said about its own strategy: large language models had become the smaller problem, next to controlling a robot at high rate. The bottleneck was not understanding the instruction but executing it.

What replaced it is Helix, Figure's in-house vision-language-action model, which runs entirely on the robot's own GPUs with no cloud connection — it takes camera input and a spoken instruction and drives all the actuators directly. Helix 02, from January 2026, extended that to whole-body autonomy, and Figure now demonstrates it on genuinely awkward domestic tasks: loading a dishwasher, folding laundry, sorting packages at about 98.5% of human speed.

BotQ, and building robots with robots

BotQ is Figure's own factory, announced in early 2025 with a stated target of 12,000 humanoids a year and the explicit intention that Figure robots help build Figure robots. The ramp has been the company's most concrete achievement: roughly 60 robots in February 2026, 240 by April, and over 350 delivered — production going from one robot a day to one an hour in under 120 days. Figure 04's design was locked in May 2026.

A separate initiative, Index, launched in August 2026 as a gig platform paying people to wear sensors while they work, harvesting the human demonstration data Helix trains on. Figure expects it to cost around $1 billion a year — a striking admission that data, not hardware, is now the expensive part.

Markets and Customers

Figure's anchor customer is BMW, and the relationship is the most thoroughly documented humanoid deployment anywhere. It began in January 2024 at Plant Spartanburg in South Carolina, where a Figure 02 supported production of more than 30,000 BMW X3 vehicles over ten months — the only humanoid programme with a production figure attached rather than a pilot announcement. On 25 June 2026 BMW moved to Figure 03 and a harder task: components arrive in unsorted containers and the robot picks and sequences them into trolleys before assembly. BMW's own head of production control calls Spartanburg “the birthplace of humanoid robotics in BMW Manufacturing's operational day-to-day activities.”

Commercially Figure is aiming at two markets at once rather than choosing. On the industrial side the robots bill by the hour — roughly $25 per robot-operating-hour at BMW as of early 2026. On the consumer side Adcock floated leasing Figure 03 at around $600 a month in May 2026, which is the number that matters if humanoids are ever to reach households: not the purchase price, but the monthly one.

The honest caveat, and it applies to the $39 billion as much as to the robots: one named production customer, a few hundred units delivered, and no consumer product shipping. Figure is the best-capitalised company in this field and among the best at demonstrating capability. Whether it is the best at selling robots is a question 2027 will answer, not 2026.