Figure AI: The Startup Putting Humanoids Inside BMW and OpenAI's Stack
Figure 02 combines OpenAI-powered reasoning with industrial-grade hardware. With BMW deployments live and a $2.6B valuation, Figure is the one to watch.
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The Company
Founded in 2022 by Brett Adcock, Figure AI raised $675M in early 2024 from Microsoft, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, and Intel Capital — pushing valuation to $2.6B.
Figure 02
Announced in August 2024, Figure 02 features 6 onboard RGB cameras, integrated speech-to-speech reasoning powered by a custom OpenAI model, 3x compute over Gen 1, and 16-DoF hands rated to lift 25kg.
BMW Partnership
Figure robots are operational at BMW's Spartanburg, SC plant — performing sheet metal insertion tasks. This is one of the first commercial humanoid deployments in U.S. automotive manufacturing.
Helix VLA Model
In early 2025, Figure unveiled Helix, a Vision-Language-Action model that runs entirely on the robot's onboard GPUs — enabling household tasks without cloud dependency.
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