# Brett Adcock

> Source: https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/brett_adcock
> Updated: 2026-06-08
> Categories: AI Companies, People
> From AI Wiki (https://aiwiki.ai), a free encyclopedia of artificial intelligence. Quote with attribution.

Brett Adcock (born April 6, 1986) is an American technology entrepreneur, the founder and chief executive of [Figure AI](/wiki/figure_ai), a company building general-purpose [humanoid robots](/wiki/humanoid_robot). A serial founder, he earlier started the recruiting marketplace Vettery, which the Adecco Group acquired in 2018, and co-founded the electric-aircraft maker [Archer Aviation](/wiki/archer_aviation), which went public in 2021. Under Adcock, Figure grew into one of the most valuable robotics startups in the world, reaching a $39 billion post-money valuation in a September 2025 funding round. Time named him to its 2024 list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence.[1][2][9][10]

| Year | Venture | Role | Outcome |
|------|---------|------|---------|
| 2013 | Vettery | Co-founder | Recruiting marketplace; sold to the Adecco Group in 2018 |
| 2018 | Archer Aviation | Co-founder, co-CEO | eVTOL aircraft maker; public via SPAC in 2021; he left in 2022 |
| 2022 | Figure AI | Founder, CEO | General-purpose humanoid robots |
| 2023 | Cover | Founder | AI security and weapons detection |
| 2025 | Hark | Founder | AI hardware; about $6 billion valuation in 2026 |

## Early life and education

Adcock was born on April 6, 1986, and grew up on his family's third-generation corn and soybean farm outside Moweaqua, a small town in central Illinois. He has described the long hours and self-reliance of farm life as formative, and credits Isaac Asimov's Robot novels with sparking an early fascination with intelligent machines.[1][2]

He showed an entrepreneurial streak young, building and launching web companies from the age of 16, including an early financial-content site called Street of Walls and several other software ventures. He graduated as valedictorian of Central A&M High School, then enrolled at the [University of Florida](/wiki/university_of_florida), where he began in industrial engineering before switching to business. He earned a Bachelor of Science in business administration in 2008.[1][2]

## Vettery

In 2013 Adcock co-founded Vettery in New York City with Adam Goldstein, a partner who would later co-found Archer alongside him. Vettery operated as an online recruiting marketplace that matched job seekers, especially in technical and finance roles, with employers, inverting the traditional model so that companies competed to interview vetted candidates. The business went through several pivots before settling on that approach.[1][2]

By 2017 Vettery had scaled to roughly 300 employees and around 20,000 customers, facilitating tens of thousands of interviews each month. In 2018 the Adecco Group, one of the world's largest staffing firms, acquired the company for a reported $110 million. The exit gave Adcock both the capital and the credibility to move into far more capital-intensive hardware ventures.[1][2]

## Archer Aviation

In 2018 Adcock again teamed with Adam Goldstein to co-found [Archer Aviation](/wiki/archer_aviation), an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft company based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Archer set out to build battery-powered air taxis for short urban trips, and the founders recruited engineers from established programs such as Airbus Vahana, Kitty Hawk, and [Joby Aviation](/wiki/joby_aviation). The company secured a high-profile order worth more than $1 billion from United Airlines for its aircraft.[1][2]

In February 2021 Archer agreed to merge with the special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Atlas Crest Investment Corp and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker ACHR later that year, one of several eVTOL firms to reach public markets during the SPAC boom. Around the same period, Archer became the subject of a closely watched trade-secret lawsuit brought by the competing eVTOL developer Wisk Aero, a dispute the two sides settled in 2023.[1][2]

Adcock and Goldstein ran Archer as co-CEOs until April 21, 2022, when Adcock stepped down to simplify the company's leadership, leaving Goldstein as sole chief executive. He resigned from Archer's board weeks later while remaining a major shareholder. He has said the move reflected his decision to focus full time on humanoid robotics, the field that became his next company.[3]

## Figure AI

Adcock founded [Figure AI](/wiki/figure_ai) in May 2022, based in Sunnyvale, California, and later headquartered in San Jose. His thesis was that advances in batteries, actuators, and AI had made a commercially useful general-purpose humanoid robot feasible for the first time, and that such a robot could address persistent labor shortages in warehouses, manufacturing, and eventually the home. He initially self-funded the effort and assembled an early team of roughly 60 engineers drawn from [Boston Dynamics](/wiki/boston_dynamics), [Tesla](/wiki/tesla), [Google DeepMind](/wiki/google_deepmind), and Apple. Figure emerged from stealth in early 2023, and in May 2023 it raised a $70 million Series A.[1][2][4]

The company's robots are bipedal humanoids roughly the size of an adult, intended to walk, balance, and manipulate objects in environments built for people. Figure 01, the first generation, achieved dynamic bipedal walking within about a year of development and walked publicly for the first time in October 2023. Successive generations added onboard sensing, compute, and dexterity, culminating in a design aimed squarely at mass production and the home.[4][5][11]

| Generation | Introduced | Notes |
|------------|-----------|-------|
| Figure 01 | 2023 | First prototype; reached dynamic bipedal walking within about a year; used in early factory and AI demonstrations |
| Figure 02 | August 2024 | Second generation with integrated cameras, microphones, and onboard compute; deployed on BMW's production line |
| Figure 03 | October 2025 | Designed for the home and for high-volume manufacturing; softer materials, wireless charging, and improved hands; runs the Helix model |

To build at scale, Figure announced a high-volume manufacturing facility called BotQ in 2025, with a first production line designed to assemble up to 12,000 humanoids per year.[11]

### The Helix model and the OpenAI partnership

In February 2024 Figure announced a collaboration with [OpenAI](/wiki/openai) to develop next-generation AI models for its robots, paired with a $675 million Series B that valued the company at about $2.6 billion. Investors in that round included [Microsoft](/wiki/microsoft), the OpenAI Startup Fund, [NVIDIA](/wiki/nvidia), [Jeff Bezos](/wiki/jeff_bezos) through Bezos Expeditions, Intel Capital, and Parkway Venture Capital. A widely shared demonstration in March 2024 showed a Figure 01 robot holding a spoken conversation and reasoning about objects on a table using OpenAI models.[1][7]

The arrangement proved short-lived. In February 2025 Adcock announced that Figure was ending the OpenAI collaboration, saying the company had achieved a "major breakthrough" in its own models and would build its robot AI fully in house. He argued that solving embodied AI at scale requires vertically integrating the hardware and the AI, comparable to the approach Tesla takes with self-driving. Alongside the split, Figure unveiled [Helix](/wiki/figure_helix), a vision-language-action model that maps camera images and natural-language instructions directly to motor commands.[1][7]

Helix uses a dual-system design. A slower "System 2," an internet-pretrained vision-language model running at roughly 7 to 9 Hz, handles scene understanding, language, and high-level planning, while a fast "System 1" visuomotor policy runs at 200 Hz to produce continuous motor commands, controlling the robot's full upper body across 35 degrees of freedom. Figure presented Helix as the first such model able to coordinate two robots working together on a shared task.[7]

### BMW deployment

In January 2024 Figure signed a commercial agreement with [BMW](/wiki/bmw) to test humanoid robots in automotive manufacturing. Figure 02 units were deployed at BMW's plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where they worked on the body shop line, placing sheet-metal parts into fixtures. The companies described it as the first time a general-purpose humanoid operated on a live, high-volume automotive assembly line. Across the pilot, the robots loaded more than 90,000 parts and contributed to the production of more than 30,000 BMW vehicles before the deployment began transitioning to newer hardware. In 2026 BMW said it would extend the use of humanoids to a plant in Germany.[8]

### Funding and valuation

In September 2025 Figure announced a Series C that exceeded $1 billion in commitments at a $39 billion post-money valuation, led by Parkway Venture Capital with participation from Brookfield Asset Management, NVIDIA, Intel Capital, and other strategic investors. The round, roughly a fifteenfold increase over the company's valuation eighteen months earlier, made Figure one of the most valuable robotics startups in the world and brought its total funding to more than $1.9 billion. As of mid-2026 the company had not filed to go public, and observers placed a likely initial public offering window in 2027 or later.[9]

## Approach

Adcock is known for a fast, vertically integrated style of company building. He favors recruiting senior engineers from leading hardware and AI organizations, owning the full stack from actuators to neural networks, and pushing toward manufacturing early rather than treating it as an afterthought. He publishes "master plan" style posts and frequent updates on X, framing humanoid robots as a way to relieve labor shortages first in industrial settings and eventually in homes, and he has predicted that humanoids will one day be as common as cars.[1][2]

He also tends to run more than one venture at a time. In 2023 he founded Cover, a security company that uses sensors and AI, in part licensed from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to detect concealed weapons. In 2025 he started Hark, focused on AI models and consumer AI hardware devices; Bloomberg reported in May 2026 that Hark had reached a valuation of about $6 billion. Press accounts in early 2026, including by Forbes and the New York Times, estimated Adcock's net worth at around $19 billion, almost entirely tied to his stake in Figure. He lives in Palo Alto, California, with his wife and three children.[1][12]

## References

1. "Brett Adcock." Wikipedia. Accessed June 8, 2026.
2. Blain, Loz. "High-tech entrepreneur Brett Adcock on Figure, Archer, and early success." New Atlas, newatlas.com.
3. "Archer Aviation Announces Leadership Transition; Appoints Adam Goldstein Sole CEO." Archer Aviation investor relations, April 21, 2022; "Archer's Brett Adcock steps down as co-CEO." Vertical Magazine, April 2022.
4. "Figure emerges from stealth with the first images of its humanoid robot." TechCrunch, March 2, 2023.
5. "Figure's humanoid robot walks for the camera." TechCrunch, October 17, 2023.
6. "Figure 02." Figure AI news, figure.ai, August 6, 2024.
7. "Helix: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Generalist Humanoid Control." Figure AI, figure.ai, February 2025.
8. "F.02 Contributed to the Production of 30,000 Cars at BMW." Figure AI, figure.ai/news/production-at-bmw; "Successful test of humanoid robots at BMW Group Plant Spartanburg." BMW Group press release, press.bmwgroup.com.
9. "Figure Exceeds $1B in Series C Funding at $39B Post-Money Valuation." Figure AI, figure.ai/news/series-c, September 16, 2025; "Figure reaches $39B valuation in latest funding round." TechCrunch, September 16, 2025.
10. "The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2024." Time, 2024.
11. "Figure 03." Figure AI, figure.ai, October 9, 2025; "BotQ: A High-Volume Manufacturing Facility for Humanoid Robots." Figure AI, figure.ai/news/botq, 2025.
12. "AI Hardware Startup Hark Valued at $6 Billion in New Funding Round." Bloomberg, May 21, 2026.