Figure AI

Figure AI is a robotics company founded in 2022 by Brett Adcock, focused on developing and commercialising humanoid robots for real-world industrial applications. Standing approximately 170 cm tall and weighing around 60 kg, Figure AI's robots represent a commercially-focused approach to humanoid robotics, with units already deployed in manufacturing environments. The company has secured significant funding and strategic partnerships, including an OpenAI collaboration to integrate advanced language models into its robots' AI systems.

Figure AI's product line runs from Figure 01 (original prototype) through Figure 02 (its first industrial workhorse) to Figure 03, unveiled in late 2025, which introduces soft textile surfaces for safer human-robot interaction. Figure 02 completed an 11-month pilot at BMW Plant Spartanburg (USA), assisting in producing over 30,000 BMW X3s — moving over 90,000 components and logging approximately 1,250 operating hours at ten-hour shifts, five days per week.

Figure AI raised over $1 billion in its September 2025 Series C at a $39 billion post-money valuation, and in October 2026 the company said it held more than $2 billion in cash. It is also pursuing the consumer market: in May 2026, CEO Brett Adcock stated that Figure 03 would be offered on a home lease at around $600 per month, targeting household tasks like laundry, dishes, and tidying, with the robot self-docking to charge when idle. No delivery date for the home lease programme has been confirmed. Figure's robots run the proprietary Helix AI model, a vision-language-action model that lets robots understand spoken instructions and adapt to new task layouts without explicit reprogramming.

What Changed in 2026

Production at scale. Figure 03 was designed for mass manufacture, using die-casting and injection moulding in place of the CNC machining used for Figure 02. Figure says this cut manufacturing cost by more than 90% compared with Figure 02. By late April 2026 its BotQ plant was producing about one robot per hour, and on 23 July 2026 Figure announced its 1,000th Figure 03. The stated long-term goal is 50,000 units a year.

The 200-hour sorting test. In May 2026 a challenge to run an eight-hour package-sorting shift turned into a livestream from Figure's Sunnyvale headquarters that kept going for 200 hours. Three Figure 03 robots running Helix 02, nicknamed Bob, Jim and Rose by viewers, processed 249,560 packages. Figure reported no mechanical failures or system crashes, with dropped or misoriented parcels counted as handling errors. The run was continuous across the team, not per robot: units with low batteries (about four hours of runtime) were swapped out and walked themselves to a wireless charging dock.

Paying people to film chores. Figure's Index programme pays people to record first-person video of everyday tasks, and the company has committed about $1 billion over 12 months to it. By October 2026 Figure reported 37.5 million uploaded videos from 112 countries, 210,000 people uploading in a single week, and an estimated $8.1 million spent on data that week. In a test published on 17 September 2026, Figure 03 attempted household chores in 30 rented Bay Area homes it had never seen. With Index data in training, 56% of 420 trials succeeded (237), against 9% without it. That is a big jump, but it still means the robot failed 44% of the time.

Compute. Figure has a $3.5 billion compute commitment with Nscale for up to 100,000 NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs, with an intention to expand it to $6 billion. The infrastructure is planned for West Texas and expected online in 2027.

Figure 04 and Helix 3.0. At an all-hands meeting released on 22 October 2026, Adcock said Figure 04 had reached “design lock”, though actuators, batteries and hands were still being tested. Figure 04 uses a fourth-generation hand that the company says approaches human-level dexterity, with fingertip tracking tuned to millimetre-level precision. No degrees-of-freedom count or price has been published. Adcock also previewed Helix 3.0 without a release date. He described an internal result from a larger model as “baby AGI”, but gave no task list, definition or success metrics, so treat that as a claim rather than a demonstrated result.

How it compares with Tesla Optimus. Figure has robots working at customer sites in three US states, and in June 2026 Adcock said robots now outnumber humans at Figure itself. It also moves quickly between hardware generations: Figure 04 is at design lock while Figure 03 is still ramping. Tesla Optimus has far greater manufacturing scale, its own AI chips and more capital. But Elon Musk said in January 2026 that Optimus was “not in usage in our factories in a material way”, the Gen 3 robot has still not been shown publicly, and in October 2026 Tesla put the start of deliveries to other companies at around the end of 2027.