Figure AI — The Humanoid Start-up That Teamed Up with OpenAI and Entered a BMW Plant

Figure (Figure AI) is a California start-up developing general-purpose humanoid robots. Founded by Brett Adcock in 2022, it signed its first commercial agreement, with BMW, in 2024 and announced a partnership with OpenAI alongside a $675 million funding round. Within a few years of its founding its valuation reached $39 billion, making it a symbol of the investment boom in humanoid robots. It has also drawn attention for gaps between its announcements and reality, and for a lawsuit over safety. This page treats the company's claims as claims.

2024: BMW and OpenAI

On 18 January 2024 BMW and Figure announced an agreement to bring the Figure 01 humanoid into BMW's plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina. According to BMWBLOG, the two would first identify tasks where the robot could be useful and then deploy it in stages, starting with a few robots and adding more if targets were met; no dates or financial terms were given. BMW was Figure's first commercial partner since its founding in 2022.

Then, on 29 February 2024, Figure announced a $675 million Series B at a $2.6 billion valuation.

At the time Figure had 80 employees and had been founded 21 months earlier. A company building large language models that handle language was joining a company building robots with bodies, in a bid to carry generative AI's abilities into the physical world. According to TechCrunch, Figure 02, announced in August 2024, was to use OpenAI's models for natural-language conversation.

February 2025: the break with OpenAI, and Helix

On 4 February 2025, however, Figure said on X that it was leaving its agreement with OpenAI, citing a "major breakthrough" in-house. Speaking to TechCrunch, Adcock declined to give details but promised to show "something no one has ever seen on a humanoid" within 30 days. "We can't outsource AI for the same reason we can't outsource our hardware," he said.

On 20 February the same month Figure unveiled its own model, Helix. According to the company, Helix is a generalist vision-language-action (VLA) model in two parts.

Figure says Helix runs entirely on low-power GPUs built into the robot, and showed one set of weights running on two robots at once as they put away groceries they had never seen, guided by spoken instructions; it calls Helix the first VLA to control a humanoid's whole upper body at high rate. These are the company's own descriptions, without independent verification. The logic of the split was that the language model is only one piece of the foundation, and the hard part is a model that controls the robot at speed.

The work at BMW: claims and reporting

On 6 April 2025 Fortune asked whether Adcock was exaggerating Figure's work with BMW. According to the magazine, Adcock had written on LinkedIn in February that Figure had a "fleet of robots performing end-to-end operations" at BMW, and said in early March that the humanoids were "running everyday now". A BMW spokesperson, however, said that until around March a single Figure robot had only been moving and practising with parts outside production hours, and that during live production it would start with one limited task at a time. Figure did not respond to Fortune's requests for comment.

Figure later published its own results from BMW on 19 November 2025.

The company wrote that the forearm was the most common point of failure, redesigned it for Figure 03, and said Figure 02 would be retired. The post does not say how many robots were involved. On 30 June 2026 Figure announced that Figure 03 had arrived in an assembly and logistics hall at Spartanburg to work on parts sequencing.

A $39 billion valuation and Figure 03

On 16 September 2025 Figure announced more than $1 billion in committed capital in a Series C at a $39 billion post-money valuation. Parkway Venture Capital led the round, joined by Brookfield, NVIDIA, Macquarie Capital, Intel Capital, Salesforce, Qualcomm Ventures and others. The money was to go to expanding production at its BotQ factory, GPU infrastructure for training and simulation, and collecting human video and other data.

On 9 October 2025 it unveiled its third generation, Figure 03. Figure says it was designed around Helix and for use in the home, with soft materials at pinch points and layered protection for the battery. BotQ's first-generation line can build up to 12,000 a year, with a goal of 100,000 over four years.

A lawsuit over safety

In November 2025 Robert Gruendel, Figure's former head of product safety, sued the company. According to Interesting Engineering, citing CNBC's report, Gruendel alleges that he warned the CEO and chief engineer that the robots were "powerful enough to fracture a human skull", citing an incident in which a malfunctioning robot cut a quarter-inch gash into a steel refrigerator door, and that he was fired afterwards. He also alleges that a safety plan shown to prospective investors was weakened before they invested. A Figure spokesperson said he was "terminated for poor performance" and that his allegations were falsehoods the company would discredit in court. All of these are the parties' claims, not court findings.

For humanoids that promise to enter homes, how to verify and explain the safety of a machine moving in the same space as people is as weighty a question as its capabilities. Developments from the same years are on the pages for Tesla's Optimus, the electric Atlas and Unitree. The wider story is in the humanoid and AI robots timeline.