Figure AI

Figure AI is a privately held American robotics company that develops electrically powered humanoid robots and the software used to control them. Brett Adcock founded the company in 2022. By May 2026, Figure described its headquarters as San Jose, California.^[1] Its three publicly presented robot generations are Figure 01, Figure 02, and Figure 03.^[2][3][4] As of July 2026, its current control system, Helix, was a vision-language-action model intended to connect visual perception and language instructions to robot motion.^[5][6]

Figure first focused on industrial uses, particularly material handling and automotive manufacturing.^[7] BMW tested Figure 02 at its Spartanburg, South Carolina plant in 2024, then used the model in a longer production deployment in 2025. BMW said in June 2026 that Figure 02 had supported production of more than 30,000 BMW X3 vehicles during ten months of work and that Figure 03 would next be evaluated for a logistics sequencing task at the same plant.^[3][8] Figure and Catalyst Brands also announced a May 2026 commercial partnership whose initial phase was planned for a distribution center in Reno, Nevada.^[1]

As of July 28, 2026, the company's most recent disclosed financing was a Series C announced on September 16, 2025. Figure said the round had attracted more than $1 billion in committed capital at a $39 billion post-money valuation.^[9] That figure is a private financing valuation, not a public market capitalization. Many technical, production, and autonomy measurements discussed by Figure come from the company's own reports and demonstrations. Where no customer, regulator, court, or independent evaluator has confirmed a claim, this article identifies it as company-reported rather than treating it as an independently established result.

Company and strategy

Figure's stated aim is to build a general-purpose humanoid that can work in environments designed around human bodies. Adcock's May 2022 master plan framed humanoids as a way to expand the supply of labor and initially excluded military or defense uses from the company's target applications.^[7] That document is a statement of corporate intent, not evidence that a generally capable product already exists.

The company argues that a human-shaped machine can use existing doors, stairs, tools, workstations, and material-handling layouts without requiring every site to be rebuilt. Its development strategy combines hardware, artificial intelligence, data collection, and manufacturing in one organization. Figure says it designs major systems such as actuators, hands, batteries, sensors, electronics, and control software, while also buying individual components and manufacturing services from suppliers.^[10][4]

Figure's public roadmap has moved through three overlapping stages:

Scroll sideways for more →

These are development stages, not proof of broad commercial availability. Figure has not published audited unit sales, revenue, profitability, or a general consumer release schedule in the sources used for this article.

History

Formation and Figure 01

Adcock founded Figure in 2022 after previously co-founding the recruiting marketplace Vettery and the electric-aircraft company Archer Aviation. Figure's first external financing was a $70 million Series A announced on May 24, 2023 and led by Parkway Venture Capital. The company did not disclose a precise valuation for that round; Reuters reported only that a source close to Figure placed it above $400 million.^[2]

Figure said its first-generation robot, Figure 01, took its first steps in May 2023.^[11] Intel Capital added a $9 million equity investment to the Series A in July 2023. The investment announcement said the money was intended to support Figure 01 development, the company's robot-data pipeline, and commercialization work.^[11]

By July 2023, Figure described Figure 01 as a robot in testing that had taken its first walking steps.^[11] The reviewed public record does not include a standardized independent evaluation showing that Figure 01 could autonomously perform unrestricted work.

Series B, OpenAI, and Figure 02

On January 18, 2024, Figure announced a commercial agreement with BMW Manufacturing. The agreement called for identifying initial automotive use cases and deploying robots in stages at BMW Group Plant Spartanburg.^[13] Figure then announced a $675 million Series B on February 29, 2024 at a $2.6 billion valuation. Named investors included Microsoft, the OpenAI Startup Fund, Nvidia, Jeff Bezos through Bezos Expeditions, Parkway Venture Capital, Intel Capital, Align Ventures, ARK Invest, and Amazon's Industrial Innovation Fund.^[12][17]

The February announcement also described two technology relationships. Figure and OpenAI agreed to collaborate on models for humanoid robots, while Figure said it would use Microsoft Azure for AI infrastructure, training, and storage.^[12] Figure later ended the OpenAI development collaboration. On February 4, 2025, Adcock told TechCrunch that the company had chosen to vertically integrate robot AI because it could not outsource AI separately from its hardware.^[18] The OpenAI Startup Fund was an investor in the 2024 financing; that investment and Figure's technical collaboration with OpenAI were separate relationships.

Figure unveiled Figure 02 in August 2024. BMW Group reported a height of about 170 centimeters, a mass of 70 kilograms, and a load capacity of 20 kilograms.^[19] During a trial lasting several weeks, Figure 02 inserted sheet-metal parts into fixtures in the Spartanburg body shop. BMW explicitly said at the end of that trial that no Figure robots remained at the plant and that no timetable for a return had been set.^[3] Nvidia reported that Figure 02 used two Nvidia RTX-based modules, giving Figure a claimed threefold inference increase over Figure 01, together with six RGB cameras and redesigned hands.^[14]

In-house AI, BotQ, and Figure 03

Figure introduced Helix on February 20, 2025. It presented the system as an in-house VLA model that could control the upper body of Figure 02 from camera images and language instructions.^[5] In March, the company announced BotQ, an internal manufacturing operation designed around a first-generation line with capacity for up to 12,000 robots per year. That number was a designed annual capacity, not a report that 12,000 robots had been built or sold.^[10]

The scope of Figure's BMW work became a subject of public scrutiny in April 2025. Fortune reported that, up to part of March, the robot had operated during off-hours even though Adcock had described a fleet performing end-to-end operations.^[20] Later evidence shows that the project subsequently expanded. A BMW spokesperson told TIME that multiple Figure 02 robots began working ten-hour production shifts, five days per week, in April 2025.^[21] BMW's June 2026 account independently confirmed a ten-month production deployment and more than 30,000 vehicles supported.^[8] The trial, the later line deployment, and the eventual production total therefore refer to different phases.

Figure announced three connected initiatives in September and October 2025:

1. On September 16, it announced more than $1 billion in Series C committed capital at a $39 billion post-money valuation.^[9][22]
2. On September 17, it announced a partnership with Brookfield Asset Management covering investment, data collection, AI infrastructure exploration, and possible future deployments across Brookfield properties.^[15]
3. On October 9, it introduced Figure 03, a third-generation robot redesigned around Helix, home-oriented safety features, wireless charging, and manufacturing at BotQ.^[4]

Figure retired Figure 02 from its active fleet after the BMW deployment and shifted development to Figure 03.^[23] In January 2026 it introduced Helix 02, extending learned control from the upper body to locomotion and whole-body manipulation.^[6]

Robots

Figure 01

Figure 01 was the company's first integrated humanoid development platform. Figure said it first walked in May 2023 and was in testing by July of that year.^[11] The company presented it as a prospective platform for manual labor in logistics, warehousing, and other supply-chain settings.^[7][11] Figure did not release a standardized independent evaluation covering the full set of capabilities described in its promotional material.

Figure 02

Figure 02 was the first Figure model tested and later deployed in an active customer production environment.^{[3][21][23][8]} Compared with Figure 01, it added computing capacity and used new cameras, microphones, sensors, and hands.^[3][14] BMW Group reported a mass of 70 kilograms, an approximate height of 170 centimeters, and a load capacity of 20 kilograms.^[19] Figure's second-generation system became the hardware platform for the first version of Helix and for the 2025 BMW production work.

Figure's November 2025 retrospective said the BMW deployment accumulated more than 1,250 operating hours, loaded more than 90,000 parts, and contributed to more than 30,000 X3 vehicles. It also said the task required placement within a 5-millimeter tolerance and used an 84-second total cycle target.^[23] BMW later confirmed the duration, task, and vehicle count, but did not independently publish all of Figure's operational measurements.^[8]

Figure 03

Figure introduced Figure 03 on October 9, 2025 as its first robot designed from the start for larger-scale production. The company replaced many machined components with processes such as die casting, injection molding, and stamping. It also added palm cameras, fingertip tactile sensors, soft exterior materials, wireless inductive charging, and a 10-gigabit-per-second wireless data-offload system.^[4]

Figure reported the following Figure 03 characteristics. These are manufacturer specifications, not independent benchmark results.^[24][4]

Scroll sideways for more →

Figure said in July 2025 that the battery was in the process of certification to UN 38.3 and UL 2271. Its October 2025 Figure 03 announcement said UN 38.3 certification had been achieved.^[24][4] Section 38.3 of the United Nations Manual of Tests and Criteria specifies transport-related testing for lithium cells and batteries; it is not certification of the complete robot or its autonomous behavior.^[25]

The company did not provide a retail price or a firm general-consumer availability date in the product and company materials reviewed through July 28, 2026. Earlier press interviews discussed home testing and long-term household use, but those plans should not be presented as a completed consumer launch.^[21]

Helix AI system

Technical context

A VLA model uses visual observations and language instructions to produce robot actions. Earlier research systems such as RT-2 showed how knowledge from web-scale vision-language training could be adapted to robotic control, while OpenVLA provided an open implementation trained on a mixture of Internet-scale and robot data.^[26][27] Figure applies the general VLA idea to a humanoid with many continuously controlled joints.

Figure describes Helix in technical web reports rather than in a peer-reviewed paper with independently reproduced experiments. Its architecture and reported performance should therefore be understood as company disclosures. The reports are useful primary evidence for what Figure built and claimed, but they do not substitute for testing by an external laboratory or comparison on a shared benchmark.

Original Helix

The first Helix release used two learned components:

Scroll sideways for more →

Figure said the two components were trained end to end and communicated through a continuous latent representation. System 2 processed an image, robot state, and language command; System 1 converted that representation into wrist, finger, head, and torso targets. The company reported a 35-degree-of-freedom action space and inference split across two onboard embedded GPUs.^[5]

The reported training set contained about 500 hours of demonstrations collected through robot teleoperation from multiple robots and operators. Figure used another vision-language model to generate retrospective text instructions for video segments. Its public demonstrations included handling previously unseen household objects and two robots following complementary language instructions. Figure described these results as zero-shot generalization, but it did not publish a full evaluation set, confidence intervals, failure distribution, or outside replication.^[5]

Helix 02

Helix 02, announced on January 27, 2026, added a learned whole-body controller called System 0 beneath the earlier hierarchy. Figure reported that:

Scroll sideways for more →

System 0 is described as a 10-million-parameter network trained in more than 200,000 simulated environments using over 1,000 hours of retargeted human-motion data. Figure said System 1 receives head-camera images, palm-camera images, fingertip force measurements, and proprioception, then sends targets for the legs, torso, head, arms, wrists, and fingers.^[6]

The launch demonstration showed a four-minute kitchen sequence involving 61 actions, including walking, unloading and loading a dishwasher, opening storage, and using the hip or foot when the hands were occupied. Figure stated that the sequence ran from onboard sensors without teleoperation or resets.^[6] This is evidence of a particular recorded task under company-controlled conditions. It does not by itself show reliable performance across arbitrary homes, objects, people, or safety-critical situations.

Data collection

Figure's Project Go-Big uses first-person video of people performing tasks as training material. The company said in September 2025 that video collected in Brookfield environments had been used to train navigation from language commands without robot demonstrations for that component.^[28] Brookfield's property portfolio gives Figure access to varied settings, but the announced partnership does not establish the eventual size, diversity, consent practices, or effectiveness of the resulting dataset. Those properties require separate evidence as the project develops.

Manufacturing

Figure announced BotQ on March 15, 2025. The facility combines assembly, battery and actuator production, reliability testing, and manufacturing software. Figure said the first line was designed for up to 12,000 humanoids per year and that its supply chain was being planned around a longer-term goal of 100,000 robots and three million actuators over four years.^[10] These were capacity and planning targets.

On April 29, 2026, Figure published its first detailed production-ramp update. It reported that BotQ had delivered more than 350 Figure 03 robots and increased the line rate from one robot per day to one per hour during the preceding 120 days. The same report listed more than 9,000 actuators made, a 99.3 percent battery-line first-pass yield, an end-of-line first-pass yield above 80 percent, more than 50 in-process inspection points, and more than 80 functional tests per robot.^[16]

Those figures describe a company-reported manufacturing snapshot on one date. A rate of one unit per hour is not the same as sustained annual output, customer deliveries, or paid sales. Figure did not publish an outside audit, the number of hours the line operated at that rate, or how the 350 robots were divided among uses. It said robots shipped from BotQ were allocated to internal research and development, data collection, housework efforts, and commercial-use development.^[16]

Partnerships and deployments

BMW

BMW is the most extensively documented customer relationship:

Scroll sideways for more →

For the 2026 project, BMW described Figure 03 sorting parts from bulk containers into a sequencing trolley. BMW called the work a deployment and said development would occur both at the plant and at Figure. The release did not specify the number of robots, a paid contract value, throughput, or a completion date.^[8]

Brookfield

Brookfield Asset Management invested in the Series C and entered a strategic partnership with Figure in September 2025. The announced work covered human-video data collection in Brookfield-managed environments, possible GPU and training infrastructure, and exploration of future commercial deployments.^[15] "Explore" is the operative term for deployment: the announcement did not say that a specified number of robots had entered routine service across Brookfield properties.

Catalyst Brands

On May 26, 2026, Catalyst Brands and Figure announced a commercial partnership beginning at Catalyst's distribution logistics center in Reno. The initial task concerned repetitive sorting and packing work in a pouch-based fulfillment system. Catalyst Brands operates JCPenney and several specialty apparel brands.^[1] The announcement did not give a robot count, contract value, installation date, or operating results. It supports the existence and intended scope of the agreement, not a claim of a completed large-scale rollout.

AI and infrastructure relationships

The OpenAI Startup Fund, Microsoft, and Nvidia participated in Figure's Series B. Figure separately announced an OpenAI model-development collaboration and use of Azure infrastructure in February 2024.^[12] The OpenAI technical collaboration ended in February 2025 when Figure moved to Helix.^[18] Nvidia has supplied computing technology and described Figure's use of RTX modules, Nvidia GPUs, and Isaac Sim.^[14] Investment, supplier, cloud, and research relationships should not be collapsed into a single continuing partnership claim.

Financing

Figure's publicly announced external rounds include:

Scroll sideways for more →

The disclosed amounts total more than $1.75 billion, excluding any founder financing or capital not described in these announcements.^{[2][11][12][9]} The September 2025 valuation was independently reported by TechCrunch, which noted that Figure had raised nearly $2 billion since its founding.^[22]

Private financing valuations reflect the terms and expectations of a transaction. They do not measure revenue, profit, installed fleet size, or independently demonstrated technical performance. Figure does not publish public-company financial statements, and its exact ownership, revenue, cash use, and customer concentration are not established by the financing announcements.

Safety, standards, and legal dispute

Humanoids combine the hazards of mobile machinery, heavy actuators, batteries, software, and operation near people. OSHA says the United States has no standards specific to the robotics industry, although applicable general workplace requirements remain relevant; OSHA separately lists nonbinding industry consensus standards.^[29][30] OSHA notes that many robot accidents occur during programming, maintenance, testing, setup, and adjustment rather than during normal automated operation.^[29] ISO 10218-1:2025 specifies safety requirements for industrial robots, while ISO 10218-2:2025 covers industrial robot applications and robot cells.^[31][32]

In January 2025, Figure announced an internal Center for the Advancement of Humanoid Safety. The company said it had agreed on a plan with an OSHA-recognized testing laboratory to certify the battery, functional-safety control system, and electrical system to industrial standards. It also said it intended to publish quarterly information about tests, hazards, and corrective work.^[33] These were plans at the time of announcement. The later UN 38.3 battery certification is narrower than certification of the robot as a whole.^[24][4][25]

BMW said in June 2026 that the 2025 Figure 02 project showed precise, repeatable work could be performed safely under real production conditions.^[8] That statement concerns BMW's defined factory use case and controls. It does not establish household safety or unrestricted operation among the public.

As of July 28, 2026, Figure was also involved in an unresolved employment and safety dispute. Former principal robotic safety engineer Robert Gruendel sued Figure in November 2025, alleging that the company terminated him in retaliation after he raised concerns about robot forces and other risks. Figure denied that account, said he was dismissed for poor performance, and filed counterclaims concerning confidential documents and alleged trade-secret misappropriation.^[34]

A July 6, 2026 federal court order addressed how documents would be handled during discovery. It summarized both sides' allegations but did not decide whether either side's factual claims were true. Fact discovery was scheduled to continue through November 14, 2026.^[34] The dispute should therefore be described as pending allegations and counterclaims, not as a finding that Figure's robots are safe or unsafe.

Assessing public demonstrations

Figure has released detailed videos and technical descriptions of tasks such as grocery handling, laundry folding, dishwasher work, and whole-body manipulation.^[5][21][6] These materials can establish what the company chose to demonstrate and how it says the system works. They usually do not reveal the full distribution of attempts, failures, interventions, environmental preparation, maintenance, or hardware replacements.

TIME reported in October 2025 that the company used human operators to collect training demonstrations and that outside roboticists disagreed over whether scaling visual data would be sufficient for dexterous general-purpose behavior. The report also noted that Figure had high costs, no publicly disclosed revenue, and an unproven consumer product despite its large valuation.^[21] These observations do not negate the BMW production evidence, but they show why a bounded factory task, a recorded demonstration, a production target, and a generally capable commercial robot are different claims.

For that reason, descriptions such as "autonomous" in this article refer only to the particular sequences for which Figure reported no teleoperation or intervention. They do not mean that a robot can select its own objectives, handle every exception, or work safely in any environment. Broader claims require reproducible evaluations, customer operating data, incident reporting, and safety certification matched to the intended application.

Timeline

Scroll sideways for more →

See also

• Embodied AI
• Robot learning
• Robot safety
• Industrial robot
• Reinforcement learning
• Tesla Optimus
• Boston Dynamics
• Agility Robotics
• Apptronik
• Unitree Robotics

References

1. ^Catalyst Brands. "Catalyst Brands Taps Figure AI for Humanoid Automation." May 26, 2026. corporate.jcpenney.com/...-for-humanoid-automation
2. ^Reuters. "AI startup Figure raises $70 million to build humanoid robots." May 24, 2023. tech.yahoo.com/...artup-figure-raises-70-100341609
3. ^BMW Group. "Successful test of humanoid robots at BMW Group Plant Spartanburg." August 6, 2024. press.bmwgroup.com/...T0444268EN_US
4. ^Figure. "Introducing Figure 03." October 9, 2025. figure.ai/...introducing-figure-03
5. ^Figure. "Helix: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Generalist Humanoid Control." February 20, 2025. figure.ai/...helix
6. ^Figure. "Introducing Helix 02: Full-Body Autonomy." January 27, 2026. figure.ai/...helix-02
7. ^Figure. "Master Plan: Roadmap to a positive future powered by AI." May 20, 2022. figure.ai/master-plan
8. ^BMW Group. "BMW Group advances the use of Physical AI in production with Figure 03 project in Spartanburg." June 25, 2026. press.bmwgroup.com/...re-03-project-in-spartanburg
9. ^Figure. "Figure Exceeds $1B in Series C Funding at $39B Post-Money Valuation." September 16, 2025. figure.ai/...series-c
10. ^Figure. "BotQ: A High-Volume Manufacturing Facility for Humanoid Robots." March 15, 2025. figure.ai/...botq
11. ^Figure AI Inc. "Intel Capital invests in Figure as humanoid robot takes first steps." PR Newswire, July 17, 2023. prnewswire.com/...obot-takes-first-steps-301877841
12. ^Figure. "Figure Raises $675M at $2.6B Valuation and Signs Collaboration Agreement with OpenAI." February 29, 2024. prnewswire.com/...-agreement-with-openai-302074897
13. ^TechCrunch. "BMW will deploy Figure's humanoid robot at South Carolina plant." January 18, 2024. techcrunch.com/...id-robot-at-south-carolina-plant
14. ^Nvidia. "Figure Unveils Next-Gen Conversational Humanoid Robot With 3x AI Computing for Fully Autonomous Tasks." August 8, 2024. blogs.nvidia.com/...figure-humanoid-robot-autonomous
15. ^Figure. "Figure Announces Strategic Partnership with Brookfield." September 17, 2025. figure.ai/...strategic-partnership-with-brookfield
16. ^Figure. "Ramping Figure 03 Production." April 29, 2026. figure.ai/...ramping-figure-03-production
17. ^Associated Press. "Humanoid robot-maker Figure partners with OpenAI and gets backing from Jeff Bezos and tech giants." February 29, 2024. apnews.com/...02ee0bf87ec46021c84646a882133c9a
18. ^TechCrunch. "Figure drops OpenAI in favor of in-house models." February 4, 2025. techcrunch.com/...enai-in-favor-of-in-house-models
19. ^BMW Group. "Humanoid robots for BMW Group Plant Spartanburg." September 11, 2024. German-language source. bmwgroup.com/...humanoide-roboter
20. ^Fortune. "Is Figure AI's BMW robot partnership what its founder Brett Adcock says?" April 6, 2025. fortune.com/...ership-details-reality-exaggeration
21. ^TIME. "The Robot in Your Kitchen." October 9, 2025. time.com/...figure-03-robot-humanoid-reveal
22. ^TechCrunch. "Figure reaches $39B valuation in latest funding round." September 16, 2025. techcrunch.com/...aluation-in-latest-funding-round
23. ^Figure. "F.02 Contributed to the Production of 30,000 Cars at BMW." November 19, 2025. figure.ai/...production-at-bmw
24. ^Figure. "F.03 Battery Development." July 17, 2025. figure.ai/...f-03-battery-development
25. ^United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. "Recommendations on the Transport of Dangerous Goods: Manual of Tests and Criteria, Eighth revised edition." 2023. unece.org/...rev8-files
26. ^Brianna Zitkovich et al. "RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control." Conference on Robot Learning, 2023. mlanthology.org/...zitkovich2023corl-rt2
27. ^Moo Jin Kim et al. "OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model." Proceedings of the 8th Conference on Robot Learning, 2025. proceedings.mlr.press/...kim25c
28. ^Figure. "Project Go-Big: Internet-Scale Humanoid Pretraining and Direct Human-to-Robot Transfer." September 18, 2025. figure.ai/...project-go-big
29. ^Occupational Safety and Health Administration. "Robotics: Overview." Accessed July 28, 2026. osha.gov/robotics
30. ^Occupational Safety and Health Administration. "Robotics: Standards." Accessed July 28, 2026. osha.gov/...standards
31. ^International Organization for Standardization. "ISO 10218-1:2025, Robotics - Safety requirements - Part 1: Industrial robots." 2025. iso.org/...73933
32. ^International Organization for Standardization. "ISO 10218-2:2025, Robotics - Safety requirements - Part 2: Industrial robot applications and robot cells." 2025. iso.org/...73934
33. ^TechCrunch. "Figure AI details plan to improve humanoid robot safety in the workplace." January 28, 2025. techcrunch.com/...id-robot-safety-in-the-workplace
34. ^United States District Court for the Northern District of California. "Order re June 9, 2026 Discovery Dispute, Gruendel v. Figure AI, Inc., No. 5:25-cv-10094." July 6, 2026. Justia mirror. docs.justia.com/...46