Huge funding round makes “Figure” Big Tech’s favorite humanoid robot company

Enlarge / The Figure 01 and a few spare parts. Obviously they are big fans of aluminum. (credit: Figure)

Humanoid robotics company Figure AI announced it raised an astounding $675 million in a funding round from an all-star cast of Big Tech investors. The company, which aims to commercialize a humanoid robot, now has a $2.6 billion valuation. Participants in the latest funding round include Microsoft, the OpenAI Startup Fund, NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos' Bezos Expeditions, Parkway Venture Capital, Intel Capital, Align Ventures, and ARK Invest. With all these big-name investors, Figure is officially Big Tech's favorite humanoid robotics company. The manufacturing industry is taking notice, too. In January, Figure even announced a commercial agreement with BMW to have robots work on its production line.

"In conjunction with this investment," the press release reads, "Figure and OpenAI have entered into a collaboration agreement to develop next generation AI models for humanoid robots, combining OpenAI's research with Figure's deep understanding of robotics hardware and software. The collaboration aims to help accelerate Figure's commercial timeline by enhancing the capabilities of humanoid robots to process and reason from language."

With all this hype and funding, the actual robot must be incredible, right? Well, the company is new and only unveiled its first humanoid "prototype," the "Figure 01," in October. At that time the company said it represented about 12 months of work. With veterans from "Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Google DeepMind, and Archer Aviation," the company has a strong starting point.