Figure AI is an American robotics company founded in 2022 by Brett Adcock with the goal of building general-purpose humanoid robots capable of performing commercial and household labor. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, the company has rapidly become one of the most closely watched players in embodied AI, raising large funding rounds at multi-billion-dollar valuations from investors including Microsoft, OpenAI, Nvidia and Jeff Bezos.
The company's flagship hardware lines are the Figure 02 and the next-generation Figure 03, bipedal humanoid robots designed to operate in environments built for people. These platforms combine dexterous hands, onboard compute, cameras and battery systems intended to support multi-hour shifts in warehouses, manufacturing lines and eventually homes.
Figure's core differentiator is Helix, an in-house vision-language-action (VLA) model that lets the robots perceive their surroundings, understand natural-language instructions and generate motor actions without task-specific programming. By developing the AI stack and hardware together, Figure aims to scale a single learned policy across many tasks rather than hand-coding each behavior.
The company has announced commercial pilots with industrial partners, most notably an early deployment relationship with BMW Manufacturing, and has signaled ambitions to move humanoids from controlled factory cells into broader logistics and consumer settings over time.
Figure operates in an intensely competitive humanoid landscape that includes Tesla Optimus, Agility Robotics, Apptronik and 1X. Its trajectory depends on proving real-world reliability, safety and unit economics at scale, which remain unproven across the entire industry as of 2026.
For technology observers, Figure AI represents one of the clearest bets that foundation-model-style learning, applied to physical robots, can unlock a general labor platform rather than a single-purpose machine.