Armed with more than $750 million in funding, Brett Adcock vows that Figure will become one of the most important businesses in the world. First, he has a lot of work to do.
By Kerry A. Dolan with Amy Feldman, Forbes Staff
“Figure 01, can you choose a healthy snack for me from that basket?” Brett Adcock asks the humanoid robot lurking behind a table close by. Its options are an orange and a bag of chips. The robot–a.ka. Figure 01–picks up the orange using dextrous, human-like hands and gives it to Adcock.
Then Adcock asks the robot what color shirt he’s wearing. There’s a 30 second pause before the robot replies, in a slow, deep voice: “You’re wearing a dark colored shirt.” It’s correct–if not very specific (his tee is dark gray).
Adcock, the 38-year-old founder and CEO of robot maker Figure, is pumped about his robot, and for good reason. In January, the company announced a collaboration with BMW, with the goal of putting Figure’s robots to work at the German automaker’s Spartanburg, South Carolina manufacturing plant. Six weeks later, Figure raised $675 million at a $2.6 billion valuation from the likes of Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI Startup Fund and Jeff Bezos. At the same time, Figure signed a collaboration agreement with OpenAI to develop next generation AI models for humanoid robots.
The valuation makes Adcock, who owns about 50% of the Sunnyvale, California company, a new billionaire. With his Figure stake and shares from a previous startup, he’s worth an estimated $1.4 billion.
The company has Jetsons-like ambitions: a future where every human will have their own humanoid robot, or maybe two, “to do work…do the laundry, make coffee, cook dinner.” According to its founder, that’ll pay off big time. “This will be over time one of the most important businesses in the world,” Adcock says. “The goal is to be a generalizable replacement for human labor.”
Figure's first generation robot—Figure 01—is 5 feet, 6 inches tall, weighs about 130 pounds and has a battery life of two hours.
Cody Pickens for ForbesBut before any of that can happen, the two-year-old company has a mountain of challenges to work out. Walking, for instance, is a work in progress, as Forbes witnessed during a recent visit to Figure’s offices. Figure 01 needs about five minutes of warm up while tethered to an overhead beam before strolling around an open space in the middle of Figure’s offices. Things don’t go as planned. Mid warmup, the humanoid gets a kink in its mechanical hip. Its right leg gyrates wildly at an odd angle. After a few more minutes and a quick software fix, two Figure employees get the kink out. They take the tether off and Figure 01 starts walking on its own, metal parts clinking with each step.
Robots have come a long way in recent decades. They are now routinely employed to assemble cars and move stuff around warehouses. Some are starting to be used to collect and disseminate data on construction sites. The latest twist is a surge of interest in creating AI-powered humanoid robots that do many things (unlike robotic arms making cocktails) — and learn new tasks.
A gaggle of companies is at work on these bipedal creations. Tesla is developing one called Optimus that’s likely to help assemble cars. (After Adcock tweeted about Figure’s late February fundraising on social media platform X, Telsa boss Elon Musk replied “Bring it on.”) There is an Oregon-based company called Agility Robotics and a Norwegian outfit named 1X, which is backed in part by OpenAI and raised $100 million in January. Others include Austin, Texas-based Apptronik, which in March signed an agreement with Mercedes Benz for its robots. When AI-chip giant Nvidia unveiled a new initiative to work with robot makers, nearly all the robots on display were humanoids.
The big advantage of a humanoid robot is the obvious one: The world we live in was designed for humans. “If you can have a safe human-like robot that can work alongside people, the market is just outstanding,” says Jesse Coors-Blankenship, a board member at Figure, which is backed by his Parkway Venture Capital. Says BMW spokesperson Nathalie Bauters, “For the past two years, we have been investigating using mobile humanoid robots in a limited number of areas where the processes are dark, dirty, dull (repetitive), and unsafe. The application with Figure can accomplish this.”
How long until Figure’s robots are deployed at BMW and other potential customers? Given that there are currently just three functioning robots at Figure, Adcock lays out an extremely optimistic timeline. He says his robots will be working inside BMW’s Spartanburg factory in “the next 12 to 18 months, maybe in low volumes.” Says BMW’s Bauters: “In the first stages, we will have one [Figure] robot for technical evaluation.”
Getting the robots to learn new tasks isn’t automatic. To teach Figure 01 to pick up that orange, engineers–who use optical trackers and video cameras–must repeat the action with the robot at least 50 times. Learning multiple interconnected steps for assembly line work could take quite a while.
Ash Sharma, a robotics researcher at U.K.-based market research firm Interact Analysis, expects that it will be more like five to six years before Figure can commercialize its humanoids. A big issue is getting the cost of making the robots low enough so they are affordable for use in warehouses and factories. Adcock won’t say how much he spent to produce Figure’s first robots, but he’s aiming to get production costs down to $50,000 per robot.
Adcock took an indirect path to his current ultra-competitive pursuit. He grew up the older of two brothers on a corn and soybean farm run by his parents–third-generation farmers–in Moweaqua, Illinois, a village of 1,700 people about 40 miles from the state capital. He got a business degree from the University of Florida before heading to New York City, where he worked at a hedge fund called Cedar Capital Partners. In 2012 he and a fellow U of Florida graduate, Adam Goldstein, cofounded Vettery, an online jobs marketplace targeted at workers in finance and IT. They sold that to recruiting giant Adecco Group in 2018 for $110 million. Adcock walked away with an estimated $30 million, before taxes.
Goldstein and Adcock then dove into the world of electric aviation, launching an electric air taxi company called Archer Aviation in 2018 despite having no experience developing hardware. They raised money from investors including Marc Lore, who’d sold his e-commerce firm Jet.com to Walmart. The cofounders splashed out high salaries for top talent. Within three years it unveiled its first prototype two-seater air taxi. In early 2021, United Airlines placed a $1 billion order for up to 200 of Archer’s yet-to-fly air taxis and in September that year, Adcock and Goldstein took Archer Aviation public via SPAC. Seven months later, Adcock abruptly stepped down as co-CEO and left the company. The former cofounders no longer work together and won’t discuss their relationship. A spokesperson for Archer Aviation declined to comment. Louise Bristow, former head of marketing and communications at Archer Aviation, says “It was a board decision. That’s really all I can say.”
Adcock has a tendency to exaggerate. “At Archer I built five generations of aircraft from scratch,” he boasts. But building an aircraft is a team effort, not a solo affair. Plus, Archer doesn’t yet have five generations of aircraft. He also claims that he founded and funded the Archer Aviation eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) Lab at the University of Florida. “I founded that lab,” he tells me. “I funded a personal grant to the school.” But, in fact, the lab was founded by University of Florida aviation engineering professor Peter Ifju in 2021 with funding from Archer Aviation and a former Goldman Sachs partner who was advising Archer, says Ifju. “Archer probably never would have happened without us,” adds Ifju, explaining that his lab built the first small scale and half-scale prototypes for Archer. In response, Adcock admits that it is Ifju’s lab, saying, “The majority of the funding came from Archer. When I say ‘I’, I mean me, the founder of Archer.” He also did give some money to the university for the lab.
To launch Figure, Adcock worked out of a WeWork in Palo Alto, reaching out to all kinds of people in robotics. “Brett explained to us, ‘I’m going to do the NFL draft for humanoid talent,’” says John McCormick, whose venture capital firm Tamarack Global invested in both Archer and Figure. By August 2022 he had hired eight employees. Now it’s up to 90 people, with recruits from places like Boston Dynamics, Google DeepMind, Tesla and Apple’s secretive Special Projects Group. What about the fact that he hadn’t built a robot before? Adcock says that working at Archer taught him about robotics. Archer’s air taxis “have batteries, motors, embedded software, control systems,” he says.
At first, Adcock self-funded the company; he won’t disclose how much he put in, but some sources say it was about $20 million. (In addition to his Vettery payday, he has sold at least $70 million worth of Archer Aviation shares.) In March 2023, Figure raised $70 million from investors in a funding round led by Parkway Venture Capital that included Intel Capital.
For its $675 million fundraising in February, Adcock’s tireless networking helped. OpenAI approached Figure about investing, Adcock says, explaining that he had become friendly with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: “I got to know Sam really well. They wanted to get into robotics, and they came and said, ‘You have one of the best teams in the world.’” (OpenAI didn’t respond to a request for comment but its VP of Product Peter Welinder said, “We’re blown away by Figure’s progress to date,” in the funding press release.) Adcock says he had cold emailed Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and “it’s been great. We’ve been keeping in touch for over a year.” (Nvidia declined to comment.) Adds Figure board member Coors-Blankenship, “It was Sam [Altman] working with Brett to bring all the parties together” –including Microsoft, for the February funding round.
That $675 million blows away what Figure’s competitors have pulled in. Agility Robotics, founded in 2015, has raised $180 million so far. 1X has raised $140 million and Apptronik just $29 million. Sharma of Interact Analysis calls Figure’s valuation “mind boggling”–particularly given how early it is in the humanoid robotics industry.
Armed with all that cash, Adcock is still hiring. As of early April, Figure is looking to bring on about 30 more employees, in areas from global supply chain to motor controls.
Even with all the money in the world, success is not assured. Dreamers and tinkerers have been trying to create human-like automatons for hundreds of years: An Islamic engineer named Ismail al-Jazari was sketching designs for mechanical waiters in the 1100s; some 700 years later came (maybe unreliable) reports of a German fellow, Dr. Lube, who built an automaton dubbed Mr. Einsenbrass that could talk and stand, powered by electromagnets and batteries. Twenty-first century technology is light-years ahead of either, but it could still not be enough.
–With reporting by Jeremy Bogaisky
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