Figure: Designing Robots for Logistics and Warehousing
Figure has exceeded US$1bn in committed capital following its Series C financing round, while its post-money valuation now sits at US$39bn.
The latest funding supports the company’s efforts to deploy general-purpose humanoid robots into real-world environments at scale.
The investment round is led by Parkway Venture Capital, with further backing from Brookfield Asset Management, NVIDIA, Macquarie Capital, Intel Capital, Align Ventures, Tamarack Global, LG Technology Ventures, Salesforce, T-Mobile Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures.
According to Figure, the cash injection will prove crucial in progressing three key areas: manufacturing and deployment of humanoid robots; GPU infrastructure for simulation and training; and data collection to improve embodied intelligence through Helix, its proprietary AI platform.
Scaling manufacturing and deployment
At the heart of the capital raise is Figure’s ambition to scale humanoid robots into both residential and commercial settings. This includes increasing manufacturing output at its BotQ facility and enabling robots to assist with physical tasks across homes and commercial operations.
BotQ serves as the manufacturing hub for Figure’s humanoid robots, which are designed to perform human-like tasks in physical environments.
The aim is to make humanoid robots viable within a wide range of tasks, particularly those found in logistics, warehousing and domestic settings. The company intends for these robots to support the workforce by handling repetitive, physically demanding or hazardous work.
It comes as demand grows in sectors looking for automation solutions that combine physical embodiment with reasoning capabilities.
Figure has already completed two generations of humanoid robots within three years. It is now building the third model, named Figure 03.
Brett Adcock, CEO at Figure, says: "Figure's goal is to solve general robotics. This is a really hard problem.
"For the first time in history, the right technologies exist to make that possible: robots that can achieve human-level intelligence. Today, we're announcing over a billion dollars of funding. The team is in place, the robots are built and the path ahead is clear."
Training Helix through next-gen compute infrastructure
A substantial portion of the funding will be directed towards building out advanced GPU (graphics processing unit) infrastructure.
GPUs are critical to AI development because they allow the parallel processing of large volumes of data, which is necessary for training models at scale.
Helix is Figure’s proprietary AI platform built to handle perception, reasoning and control for physical robots – what the company refers to as “embodied intelligence". By increasing GPU capacity, Figure plans to improve Helix’s ability to learn through simulation, enabling robots to interpret their environments, plan actions and complete tasks more effectively.
Figure’s model is built around what it calls a “vision-language-action” system. This means Helix learns not just from visual and physical inputs, but also from the integration of language understanding, allowing the robot to follow commands and adjust based on changing contexts.
Building real-world data through Brookfield partnership
Figure has also entered into a first-of-its-kind partnership with Brookfield, one of the largest alternative asset managers in the world, with over US$1tn in assets and 100,000 residential units under management. Brookfield is both a Series C investor and a collaborator in developing a real-world humanoid training dataset for Helix.
Brookfield will assist Figure in capturing large volumes of data reflecting human navigation and object manipulation in everyday environments. This data will be used to pretrain Helix, giving the AI model exposure to the types of settings and scenarios humanoid robots may encounter once deployed. The goal is to allow robots to adapt to dynamic, complex environments with human-like responsiveness.
Brett explains: "This partnership marks a major milestone in our journey to build general-purpose humanoid robots. Brookfield’s scale gives us an unmatched platform to capture massive amounts of real-world, humanlike navigation and manipulation data across a variety of household environments necessary to unlock general-purpose humanoid robots."
Brookfield CEO Bruce Flatt adds: "This approach to collaboration furthers Brookfield’s position at the forefront of integrating AI to drive productivity in real assets and business."
