A robotics startup founded just three years ago has rapidly risen to prominence amid the tech boom, becoming the world's highest-valued humanoid robotics company through its star founder and rapidly iterating products. Figure's rise to fame embodies quintessential "Silicon Valley characteristics."

On Tuesday (September 16th), Figure announced on its official website that the company raised over $1 billion in Series C funding, achieving a post-money valuation of $39 billion, making it the world's most valuable humanoid robotics company. The funding round was led by renowned investment firm Parkway Venture Capital, with participation from industry giants including Brookfield Asset Management, NVIDIA, Intel Capital, LG Technology Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, T-Mobile Ventures, and Qualcomm Ventures. NVIDIA and Intel had previously participated in Figure's earlier funding rounds.

Founded in Silicon Valley in January 2022, Figure focuses on developing autonomous general-purpose humanoid robots. In May 2023, Figure completed a $70 million Series A round led by Parkway Venture Capital, with participants including Aliya Capital, Bold Ventures, Tamarack Global, FJ Labs, and former KUKA Robotics CEO Till Reuter. Two months later, it secured an additional $9 million Series A+ investment from Intel Capital and others. In February 2024, Figure completed approximately $675 million in Series B funding at a valuation of about $2.6 billion, with Jeff Bezos committing $100 million through his company Explore Investments LLC, Microsoft investing $95 million, and NVIDIA and Amazon's affiliated fund each investing $50 million.

Looking at the present, Figure's valuation has grown approximately 14-fold over the past year and a half. With everyone positioned at this popular frontier, why did these renowned capitals and Silicon Valley giants choose to bet on Figure?

**Exceptional Execution and Full-Stack Approach**

Within less than 12 months of establishment, Figure's team designed most components of humanoid robots from scratch. In March 2023, Figure's first humanoid robot, Figure 01, debuted, capable of completing simple physical tasks like moving boxes and learning to make coffee through human demonstration. In August 2024, Figure 02 launched with enhanced battery life, computational reasoning capabilities, and more advanced software.

Early February 2025 marked an important milestone when Figure terminated its collaboration with OpenAI and shifted to developing a completely autonomous end-to-end robot AI model called Helix. According to the company, Helix is the first Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model capable of high-frequency, continuous control of an entire humanoid robot's upper body, including head, torso, wrists, and fingers. By directly converting rich semantic knowledge captured in vision-language models into robot actions, it overcomes multiple long-standing challenges in the humanoid robotics field—at least eliminating the need for extensive training for each robot action.

Throughout this year, Figure has released a series of demonstration videos showcasing its humanoid robots' operational capabilities across various scenarios: In February, the month of the OpenAI "breakup," Figure demonstrated Helix-powered robots capable of "collaborative intelligence," with AI simultaneously controlling two robots. On March 25th, Figure updated its humanoid gait technology, enabling Figure 02 to walk naturally at 2.68 miles per hour (approximately 1.2 meters/second), nearly seven times faster than previous generations. In May, the third-generation Figure 03 was unveiled, with CEO Brett Adcock emphasizing it as the most advanced hardware system he had ever seen. In June, Figure's humanoid robots successfully learned to sort packages on logistics production lines. From July to August, Figure demonstrated robots' capabilities as "housekeepers," including removing laundry from baskets and placing it into washing machine drums, and autonomous clothes folding.

The most recent skill update came on September 3rd, with robots capable of autonomously loading dishes into dishwashers. While this task appears simple, handling smooth or fragile items requires precise operation, with dishwasher basket tolerance margins of only centimeters.

Recent research notes suggest that Figure's breakthrough in robot clothes-folding tasks marks its penetration from industrial to household scenarios, with future potential to expand capabilities around daily service needs such as cleaning and care. This means Figure has completed the leap from concept to prototype to commercial application in three years, achieving a closed loop in AI model construction, hardware development, real-world scenario data collection, and commercialization, now attempting to land in B2B scenarios while extending to consumer markets.

**Founder Called "The Next Musk"**

Figure's founder and CEO, 39-year-old Brett Adcock, brings nearly 20 years of cutting-edge technology entrepreneurship experience. He previously founded eVTOL company Archer Aviation, which went public in late 2020. Earlier, Adcock founded online talent marketplace Vettery, which was later acquired by global recruitment giant Adecco Group for $110 million.

Adcock has proclaimed his goal to "create the world's first commercially viable general-purpose humanoid robot." He invested $10 million in Figure's initial round, added $20 million in Series A, and stated he might invest at least $100 million in Figure. This all-in investment style, committing his personal wealth, has led multiple media outlets including Forbes and TechCrunch to call Adcock "the next Musk" or "Musk 2.0."

In September 2023, on "My First Million" podcast, host Sam Parr labeled Brett as "Elon Musk 2.0" on the video cover, citing his $3 billion net worth and predicting he would become a figure like Howard Hughes or Elon Musk within 10 years.

Currently, Figure is actively pushing robot mass production and B2B applications. On March 15th, Figure announced its BotQ mass production factory, with first-generation production lines capable of producing 12,000 humanoid robots annually, expanding to 100,000 robots or 3 million actuators annually over the next four years. In commercial applications, Figure has established partnerships with BMW, introducing Figure's humanoid robots for automotive production line testing at BMW's Spartanburg factory in South Carolina. Simultaneously, Figure will collaborate with Series C investor Brookfield to help develop pre-training datasets for Helix.

**Industry Accelerating Into Elimination Phase, Institutions Focus on Leading Manufacturers' Supply Chains**

Interestingly, according to reports, Adcock has publicly discussed Unitree Robotics, acknowledging competitive pressure from Chinese peers. He believes Chinese engineering teams' advantages in low cost and high efficiency will make China one of the main competitors in global robotics technology. He also predicts that "ultimately only a few teams will succeed."

Currently, the robotics boom continues surging, with Figure, Tesla Motors' Optimus, and Unitree among the first tier. Recent research suggests that only a few robotics companies with full-stack capabilities are expected to break through to the "embodied intelligence" level. The institution believes robot large models are the key path to solving traditional robot control bottlenecks and advancing toward general embodied intelligence.

The current industry primarily explores development directions based on large language models, autonomous driving large models, and multimodal large models, with industry focus shifting toward "cerebellum + brain" system development, while different companies show variations in R&D and commercialization paths. Only a very small portion of companies with full-stack technical capabilities, resource integration advantages, and long-term strategic vision will ultimately converge technical paths, define core standards for "embodied intelligence," and break through to the embodied intelligence level.

Securities analysts also note that this round of embodied intelligence boom stems from large model technological breakthroughs, with large models determining the ceiling of humanoid robot generalization capabilities and representing one of the core commercial barriers at this stage. Currently, numerous tech giants are entering the race, including Google, OpenAI, Meta, and NVIDIA, all laying out "brain" strategies. While domestic giants started slightly later, they already have mature products from companies like Huawei, Baidu, and iFLYTEK, alongside emerging excellent startups attempting to create robot "universal brains," and global leading humanoid robot startups like Figure AI beginning to develop foundational large models.

This will accelerate industry consolidation, with robotics manufacturers lacking sufficient AI capabilities potentially facing squeezed survival space. The institution further notes that reviewing humanoid robotics trends since 2022, starting with Tesla Motors' official entry into humanoid robotics, the market has shifted from early thematic trading to trend trading, spreading from Tesla Motors supply chains to domestic chains.

Track valuations have continuously risen with industrial technological breakthroughs, with market confidence strengthening alongside industrial progress. The market now deeply recognizes humanoid robotics' vast potential, applying "terminal valuation methods" to core component companies (based on Tesla Motors' projected 2029 shipment of 1 million units corresponding to profit margins, multiplied by respective market shares).

Considering current Tesla Motors supply chain valuations are already relatively high, institutions believe the second half of 2025 may see markets focusing more on supply chains with leading manufacturer orders, companies with significant marginal changes in robotics business layouts, new technical directions like cycloidal pin wheels, or domestic supply chains.