Figure sells its third-generation humanoid robot to industrial customers today, headlined by a live BMW Spartanburg deployment, while racing toward unsupervised home use by the end of 2026. Helix's newest results are the clearest public signal yet that Figure's single robot-brain approach can leave the factory floor it was built for.
Figure AI, the San Jose humanoid robotics company founded by Brett Adcock, builds production humanoid robots powered by its in-house Helix vision-language-action model. Helix's newest release hit 56% zero-shot task success across 30 previously unseen homes in September 2026, up from 9% without pretraining on Figure's Index dataset.
Founded: 2022 · HQ: San Jose, CA, USA · Team: 500-750 · CEO: Brett Adcock · Funding: $1.9B total raised: $100M seed (2022), $70M Series A (May 2023), $675M Series B (Feb 2024), $1B+ Series C (Sep 2025, led by Parkway Venture Capital) · Valuation: $39B (Series C, Sep 2025)
About Figure AI
Figure AI was incorporated as a C-Corp in late 2022 by Brett Adcock, who previously co-founded Vettery (sold to Adecco in 2018) and Archer Aviation (SPAC IPO at a $3.8 billion valuation in 2021). Adcock seeded the company with $100 million of personal capital, betting that labor shortages in physically demanding industries and rapid advances in neural network control had created the right conditions for a commercially viable humanoid robot. Headquarters moved from Sunnyvale to a 98,700-square-foot campus at 3960 North First Street in San Jose, California, in March 2025, housing engineering, fleet operations, and early manufacturing.
Figure has released three robot generations. Figure 01 was the initial proof-of-concept prototype. Figure 02 is deployed at BMW's Spartanburg, South Carolina manufacturing plant, where it assembled more than 30,000 vehicles with 99% accuracy. Figure 03, unveiled on October 9, 2025, stands 5 feet 8 inches tall, weighs 61 kilograms, carries 20-kilogram payloads, and walks at 1.2 metres per second. All three generations run on Helix, Figure's proprietary vision-language-action neural network developed entirely in-house after the company ended its OpenAI collaboration in February 2025.
In February 2025, Figure announced it had completed Helix without OpenAI, describing it as a breakthrough in fully end-to-end robot AI that gives the company ownership of both the hardware and the AI stack. On September 17, 2026, Figure introduced Helix 2.5, a successor policy initialized from random weights and pretrained entirely on Index, the company's growing library of human-behavior video. Tested with zero data collection or fine-tuning across 30 unseen Bay Area homes on three whole-body tasks (tidying scattered toys, folding towels, and making beds), Helix 2.5 succeeded zero-shot on 56% of attempts versus 9% for an identical policy trained from scratch, and matched Helix 02's in-environment success rate using half as much task-specific adaptation data. In May 2026, a team of Figure robots ran a continuous autonomous package-handling shift for nearly a week, achieving 98.5% of human throughput in a 10-hour head-to-head test. Figure 03 is designed specifically for BotQ, Figure's dedicated manufacturing facility in California launched in March 2025 with 12,000-unit annual capacity. Consumer home pilot programs for Figure 03 are planned for late 2026.
Figure's funding rounds: $100 million personal seed from Adcock in 2022; $70 million Series A in May 2023; $675 million Series B in February 2024 at a $2.6 billion post-money valuation, with Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI Startup Fund, Bezos Expeditions, Intel Capital, Salesforce, LG Technology Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, and T-Mobile Ventures participating; and a $1 billion-plus Series C in September 2025 at a $39 billion post-money valuation, led by Parkway Venture Capital with Brookfield Asset Management and Macquarie Capital. Total raised across all rounds stands at approximately $1.9 billion.
Figure sells robots directly to enterprise customers in manufacturing and logistics. The planned long-term model adds a Robot-as-a-Service layer covering hardware maintenance, Helix software updates, and fleet management. The BMW Spartanburg deployment is a revenue-generating commercial contract. UPS is in active discussions to deploy Figure robots in parcel sorting facilities. No public revenue figures or per-unit pricing have been disclosed as of June 2026.
Brett Adcock is Figure's founder and CEO. The board includes Peter Welinder, Jesse Coors-Blankenship, Gregg Hill, Grant Hosking, Lee Randaccio, Dana Berlin, Logan Berkowitz, and Colby Adcock. As of May 2026, Figure employs approximately 658 people, up 58% year-over-year from around 415 in 2024. Most staff work from the San Jose headquarters; Figure has recruited heavily from Boston Dynamics, Tesla Autopilot, and Google DeepMind.
Figure's mission is to build the world's first commercially viable autonomous humanoid robot for tasks that are unsafe, physically draining, or chronically unfilled due to labor shortages. Helix, the company's core research output, is an end-to-end VLA neural network that takes raw camera input and natural language and produces motor commands directly, skipping separate perception, planning, and control modules. This design is intended to improve generalization to novel environments. Figure keeps Helix proprietary and publishes minimal external research, prioritizing product development over open publication.
Primary competitors include Tesla (Optimus robot), Agility Robotics (Digit, majority-owned by Amazon), Boston Dynamics (Atlas humanoid), 1X Technologies (backed by OpenAI's Startup Fund after the Figure-OpenAI split), and Physical Intelligence in the robot AI foundation model space. Figure's capital access at a $39 billion valuation and BotQ's 12,000-unit annual capacity give it a manufacturing runway that most peers lack. Boston Dynamics holds a 15-year reliability advantage from fielded robots; Tesla's Optimus benefits from Gigafactory-scale manufacturing that BotQ cannot currently match. All three Figure generations target structured indoor industrial environments; outdoor unstructured settings remain unaddressed.
Figure's robots are physical hardware subject to OSHA workplace safety requirements in the US, CE marking for EU commercial deployments, and ISO robot safety standards, not the EU AI Act's software-specific GPAI obligations. The company is a US-incorporated C-Corp with no disclosed export control issues. No trust center, data processing agreement, or enterprise data retention policy has been published; Helix inference runs on the robot itself rather than streaming to a cloud, which limits the data privacy surface. Enterprise customers negotiate applicable data handling terms in their commercial contracts.
Figure's 2026 priorities include expanding the BMW Spartanburg deployment, converting the UPS discussions into a signed contract, ramping BotQ toward 12,000 units per year, and launching home pilot programs for Figure 03 by year-end. The company's stated goal is 200,000 robots shipped by 2029. An IPO has been publicly discussed but no filing has been made as of June 2026; secondary-market prices in early 2026 implied modest valuation compression below the $39 billion Series C headline.
Mission
To build the world's first commercially viable autonomous humanoid robot for tasks that are unsafe, undesirable, or chronically unfilled.
Products
- Figure 03 (Commercial humanoid robot (industrial)): https://www.figure.ai
- Figure 02 (Commercial humanoid robot (BMW Spartanburg deployment)): https://www.figure.ai
- Helix (Proprietary vision-language-action robot AI model (Helix 2.5, Sept 2026 zero-shot home results)): https://www.figure.ai
- BotQ (High-volume robot manufacturing facility (12K units/year)): https://www.figure.ai
Links
Frequently Asked Questions
How much funding has Figure AI raised?
Figure AI has raised about $1.9 billion in total across four funding rounds, most recently a Series C above $1 billion that closed at a $39 billion valuation. Parkway Venture Capital led that round, with Microsoft, Nvidia, and Bezos Expeditions among the earlier backers still on the cap table. The prior Series B had valued the company at just $2.6 billion, so the Series C marked a steep jump in roughly a year and a half. No IPO filing has been made as of this writing.
What products does Figure AI make in 2026?
Figure builds three generations of humanoid robots: Figure 01, the original prototype; Figure 02, deployed commercially at BMW's Spartanburg plant; and Figure 03, its current production model sold to industrial and logistics customers. All three run on Helix, Figure's in-house vision-language-action model, and in September 2026 the newest version, Helix 2.5, demonstrated zero-shot task success across dozens of homes it had never seen, without any on-site data collection or fine-tuning. Home pilots for Figure 03 are planned for late 2026; no robot is sold directly to consumers yet.
How does Figure AI handle data privacy and compliance?
Figure is a hardware company, not a SaaS vendor, so it does not publish SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, or GDPR certifications the way software AI providers do. Its formal obligations run through physical-product frameworks instead: US OSHA workplace-safety rules, CE marking for any European commercial deployment, and ISO 10218 robot-safety standards. Helix runs inference locally on each robot rather than streaming footage to a central server, which keeps most operational data off Figure's own infrastructure. Any data-handling terms an enterprise customer needs are negotiated directly into that customer's commercial contract.
Who are Figure AI's main competitors?
Figure's closest humanoid rivals are Tesla's Optimus program, Boston Dynamics' Atlas, Agility Robotics' Digit (majority owned by Amazon), and 1X Technologies, which drew OpenAI Startup Fund backing after Figure and OpenAI parted ways. On the underlying AI layer, Physical Intelligence is the sharpest comparison: it sells a hardware-agnostic foundation model across multiple robot bodies, while Figure keeps Helix proprietary and tuned to its own hardware. Boston Dynamics still holds a multi-decade reliability edge from robots already fielded at customers, and Tesla's Gigafactory-scale manufacturing outpaces what Figure's BotQ line can currently produce.
How do you start using Figure AI's products?
Figure does not sell robots to individual consumers yet; every current deployment, including the BMW Spartanburg line, is negotiated as a direct enterprise contract with a manufacturing or logistics customer. Interested businesses reach Figure through its own site rather than a self-serve signup, since pricing and delivery timelines are set per contract. Figure has said Figure 03's home pilots begin in late 2026, the first channel aimed at non-industrial users, though no waitlist or application process is open yet.
Top Alternatives
- Physical Intelligence: Pick Figure for vertically integrated humanoid; pick π for hardware-agnostic foundation model.