humanoid.observer
44 robots on sale today
News & Blog · Opinion · 7 min read

Figure AI: what $39 billion has shown so far

Four rounds, $1,754,000,000 raised, one named customer, no price and no unit count. The record on the most valuable humanoid company, generation by generation.

Geert Jan van VlastuinEditor, humanoid.observer
A young man sizing up a full-size humanoid robot on a shop floor
A young man sizing up a full-size humanoid robot on a shop floor

Figure AI has raised $1,754,000,000 in four rounds and was valued at $39,000,000,000 on 16 September 2025, the highest valuation in our record by a factor of 3.9. Against that, the record holds one named customer, three deployments with no unit count between them, no price and nothing you can order. Both halves are true. This is what sits between them.

Three bodies in two years

Figure AI was founded by Brett Adcock in 2022 and came out of stealth in March 2023 with Figure 01. From the first walking video in October 2023 to the Figure 03 reveal in October 2025, it showed three bodies in two years.

Generation First shown Height Weight Hand DOF Status Teleoperation
Figure 01 October 2023 168 cm 60 kg not published Retired No
Figure 02 6 August 2024 168 cm 70 kg 16 Pilot, superseded No
Figure 03 9 October 2025 168 cm 60 kg 16 Limited production No

The frame has not moved: 168 cm, a 20 kg payload, five hours of runtime and a 1.2 m/s walk on every generation. The battery went from 2.25 kWh to 2.3 kWh. What changed is everything around the frame. Figure 02 added six RGB cameras, onboard speech, five-finger hands with 16 degrees of freedom and three times the compute of Figure 01. Figure 03 added fingertip tactile sensors that Figure says register about 3 grams, cameras in the palms, a soft textile cover, wireless charging through the feet, and a body designed to be built on a line rather than by hand. Figure says Figure 03 is 9 percent lighter than Figure 02; our record rounds the two to 70 kg and 60 kg.

The hand count stayed at 16 from Figure 02 to Figure 03. Why that is the number to watch is covered in why hands are the hardest part.

The money and the milestones, by date

Date What happened Money
2022 Founded in Sunnyvale, California
March 2023 Out of stealth with Figure 01
24 May 2023 Series A, led by Parkway Venture Capital $70,000,000
12 July 2023 Series A extension, Intel Capital $9,000,000
October 2023 Figure 01 first walking video
18 January 2024 BMW Manufacturing signs for Spartanburg
29 February 2024 Series B, plus a collaboration with OpenAI $675,000,000 at $2,600,000,000
13 March 2024 Figure 01 hands over an apple in an OpenAI-powered demo
6 August 2024 Figure 02 unveiled
August 2024 Figure 02 starts at BMW Spartanburg
4 February 2025 Figure ends the OpenAI collaboration
20 February 2025 Helix published
February 2025 Package-sorting pilot for an unnamed logistics customer
15 March 2025 BotQ announced: 12,000 robots a year
16 September 2025 Series C, led by Parkway Venture Capital over $1,000,000,000 at $39,000,000,000
9 October 2025 Figure 03 unveiled
November 2025 BMW Spartanburg deployment ends

Three things stand out in the dates. The BMW agreement came six weeks before the Series B, and the round came with the OpenAI collaboration attached. Eleven months later Figure ended that collaboration, citing a breakthrough in in-house AI, and published Helix 16 days after. And the Series C closed 23 days before Figure 03 was shown, so the $39 billion was priced on Figure 02 in the field and a third body still under wraps.

What $39 billion is measured against

Our funding file holds 55 equity rounds to humanoid makers, worth $6,307,300,000 where the amount was disclosed. Figure’s four rounds are $1,754,000,000 of that, 27.8 percent. The two largest equity rounds in the database are both Figure’s. The next highest valuation we record is 1X at $10,000,000,000 in September 2025, then Physical Intelligence at $5,600,000,000.

The step from $2.6 billion to $39 billion is a multiple of 15 in 565 days. Divide the valuation by what exists. Three generations of body: $13,000,000,000 per generation. One named customer: $39,000,000,000 per customer. Published units: zero, so no number at all.

That is not an argument that the valuation is wrong. Venture pricing is a bet on what comes next, and Figure’s investors include Nvidia, Microsoft, Intel Capital, Salesforce, Qualcomm Ventures and Brookfield, who can see things we cannot. It is an argument about what the public record can support, which is a different question.

What is proved

Three deployments carry the Figure name, out of 52 in the database.

The one that counts is BMW. Figure 02 loaded sheet metal parts into fixtures on the X3 body shop line at Spartanburg, South Carolina, from August 2024. Our record marks the work autonomous. BMW confirmed the pilot, which matters: it is the only Figure claim in our record with a second party attached. Figure describes it as about 11 months of production work during 2025. It ended in November 2025 when Figure moved to Figure 03, and the fleet size was never published. The record holds 18 automotive deployments; three are marked autonomous, and BMW Spartanburg is one of them.

The second is package sorting on a conveyor at a logistics facility from February 2025, using Helix, marked autonomous. Figure has not named the customer.

The third is the Figure 03 home alpha: dishwashers, laundry and tidying in private homes, used to collect Helix training data. Our record marks it mixed. Figure has not said how many homes or how many robots. All three home deployments in our record, the two NEO rows included, are marked mixed.

So the ledger reads: one confirmed customer, one unnamed customer, one data-collection programme. 46 of the 52 deployments in our database name the customer. Figure names one of its three. Six of the 52 give a unit count. Figure gives none.

What “no teleoperation” means on these records

All three Figure records carry teleoperation: no. Only 31 of 182 records do, and once the retired, discontinued and research platforms are stripped out, five working machines are left. Two are Figure’s. The others are Galbot G1, Kawada Nextage and Robotis OP3.

Read the note beside the flag. For Figure 01, Figure stated the March 2024 demo was fully autonomous and at 1.0x speed. For Figure 02 and Figure 03, Figure says Helix runs onboard with no teleoperation, and that the training data was collected with teleoperation and human video. Helix itself, as published on 20 February 2025, pairs a 7 billion parameter vision-language model with an 80 Hz control policy on the robot’s own GPUs and controls the whole upper body.

Every one of those statements is Figure’s. The autonomy evidence field for Figure 03 says independent reporting of the home alpha is limited. For Figure 02 the evidence is Figure’s own account of BMW, plus BMW’s confirmation that the pilot happened. Nobody outside the company has published a timed, counted observation of a Figure robot working unassisted. The flag says no. The support for it is a maker statement and one customer nod. That is more than most records have, and less than the valuation implies.

What you cannot get

The buy record for Figure 03 reads: channel not for sale, lead time partner deployments only, ships nowhere. Figure 02 is enterprise only; Figure 01 and Figure 03 are not for sale. No Figure machine has ever had a price. Third-party guides put Figure 03 at around $150,000, and our verdict on that estimate stands: it tells you more about the estimators than about Figure.

Set against that is BotQ. On 15 March 2025 Figure said the plant would start at 12,000 robots a year with a path to 100,000 over four years. Figure 03 is built there from late 2025, which is why its status reads limited production. Capacity is a claim about a building. The record contains no shipped number to set beside it. AgiBot logged its 1,000th unit in January 2025. Figure has logged none, which does not mean none exist. It means nobody has said.

What would change the assessment

Three things, any of which would move Figure from company to watch to product.

A price. Any list price, lease rate or per-hour figure from Figure itself, in the way Digit is listed at roughly $8,500 a month.

A customer count. A second named customer, a unit count from BMW, or a BotQ output figure. Six rows in our deployment file carry a number. Figure needs one.

An independent observation. A reporter, an auditor or a customer describing a Figure robot doing a shift, with the operator count stated.

Until one of those appears the honest listing is: the best-funded humanoid company on record, three bodies, one confirmed customer, marked autonomous on its own word, nothing to buy. If you are deciding whether to wait for it, wait for the number, not the next body.

In this article

The machines

All on sale
Figure AI · United States

Figure 01

Retired

Figure 01 was Figure AI's first humanoid, shown walking in October 2023 and demonstrated with OpenAI's vision-language model in March 2024. It was 168 cm tall, 60 kg, with a 20 kg payload and five-hour runtime. It established the company and led to the BMW agreement in January 2024.

Height168 cm
Weight60 kg
Pricenot for sale
Figure AI · United States

Figure 02

In pilots

Figure 02, unveiled on 6 August 2024, added onboard speech, six cameras, 16 DoF hands and three times the compute of Figure 01. It became the first Figure robot to work in a customer plant, at BMW Spartanburg, and the platform for the Helix vision-language-action model. Figure retired it in favour of Figure 03 in late 2025.

Height168 cm
Weight70 kg
Pricen/a
Figure AI · United States

Figure 03

Limited production

Figure 03 is Figure AI's third-generation humanoid, unveiled on 9 October 2025 and designed for the home and for volume manufacturing at Figure's BotQ facility. It has soft textile coverings, wireless charging, palm cameras and tactile fingertips, and runs the Helix model onboard. It is the company's first robot designed for mass production rather than hand assembly.

Height168 cm
Weight60 kg
Pricenot for sale
Galbot · China

Galbot G1

Commercial

Galbot G1 is a foldable wheeled humanoid with two arms that can reach both floor and 2.4 m shelves. It is the first humanoid to run retail stores commercially in China.

Heightn/a
Weightn/a
Pricen/a
Kawada Robotics · Japan

Kawada NEXTAGE

Commercial

NEXTAGE is a humanoid-style dual-arm industrial robot from Kawada that works alongside people on assembly lines, one of the earliest humanoids used in production.

Heightn/a
Weightn/a
Pricen/a
Robotis · South Korea

ROBOTIS OP3

Commercial

ROBOTIS OP3 is the third generation of the open platform humanoid line that started with DARwIn-OP. It is a 51 cm, 3.5 kg kid size research robot with 20 degrees of freedom, an Intel NUC and a ROS based open source software stack. It is used in RoboCup and in teaching labs worldwide.

Height51 cm
Weight3.5 kg
Pricen/a
1X Technologies · United States

NEO

Limited production

NEO is 1X's consumer home humanoid, opened for preorder on 28 October 2025 at USD 20,000 with deliveries planned for 2026. It is about 30 kg, tendon-driven and wears a soft suit, and it uses remote human operators for tasks it cannot yet do autonomously. It is the first humanoid marketed directly to households at a published price.

Height165 cm
Weight30 kg
Price$20K
Agility Robotics · United States

Digit (v1 to v3)

Retired

Digit added a torso, arms and perception to the Cassie legs and was first shown in February 2019. Ford bought the first two units in 2020 for last-mile delivery research, and v2 and v3 added better perception and hands-free manipulation of totes. These versions were superseded by the 2023 Digit.

Heightn/a
Weightn/a
Price$250K

Sources

  1. 01
    Figure AIFigure AI
  2. 02
    Figure AIWikipedia
  3. 03
  4. 04
  5. 05
  6. 06
  7. 07
  8. 08
    Humanoid robots for sale: 2026 guideThere's A Robot For That
Next

Related reading

All articles