According to media reports, AI humanoid robot startup Figure announced on May 25 that it had closed A $70 million Series A funding round led by Parkway Venture Capital, Following investors include Aliya Capital, Bold Ventures, Tamarack Global, FJ Labs, and Till Reuter, former CEO of Kuka Robotics.

Funds from this round of funding will be used to accelerate the development and manufacturing of its first autonomous humanoid robot. Previously, Figure said it was launching “the world’s first commercially viable universal humanoid robot,” called Figure01.

The company has big ambitions in the field of humanoid robots. Founder Brett Adcock told IEEE Spectrum in a feature report that he has the best humanoid robot team and has a chance to be the first company to actually commercialize a universal humanoid robot. The capital markets have also been paying up. Figure is only a year old and is valued at $400 million after this round of funding.

“We believe that general-purpose humanoid robots have more potential than single-function robots,” Adcock said. Their deployment into the Labour market can help address Labour shortages and, over time, eliminate insecure and undesirable jobs.”

To make the world’s first universal humanoid robot

The confidence of the capital markets may come more from the founders themselves. Brett Adcock is a successful serial entrepreneur, having previously founded Archer Aviation and Vettery. Archer Aviation has gone public with a $2.7 billion market cap, while Vettery was acquired for $100 million.

Figure was founded in 2022 by Brett Adcock, who invested $10 million of his own money in a seed round and an additional $20 million in this round, and says it will likely spend at least $100 million in the future.

The technical team is not to be underestimated. Chief Technology Officer Jerry Pratt has spent 20 years at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), a global leader in robot design and control. He led a team that won second place in the final competition of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Robotics Challenge. Over the past year, Figure has hired more than 40 engineers from organizations like IHMC, Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Waymo, and Google X.

Brett Adcock’s goal is to create a robot that can do almost anything a human worker can do, has the ability to think, learn and interact with its environment, and is designed for initial deployment into the workforce. Brett Adcock said single-purpose robots are already common in warehouses, such as roving robots that move boxes to shelves, which are already used in Amazon operations centers, and robots created for DHL Supply Chain to unload boxes from trucks in warehouse loading areas. But humanoid robots could be a more general solution that really solves the problem of workforce.

Figure is currently designing a fully electromechanical humanoid robot with two hands. According to its model plan, the final robot will be all-electric, 1.6 meters tall, weigh 60 kilograms, have a payload of 20 kilograms, and run for five hours on a charge. After that, the unit cost of a single humanoid robot can be reduced by mass production.

The biggest difficulty in designing the robot was building an artificial intelligence system that would enable Figure’s humanoid robot to autonomously perform everyday tasks. Figure is solving this problem by building intelligent embedded AI that can interact with complex and unstructured real-world environments.

In March, Brett Adcock said it had just completed alpha, its first full-size robot, and was now working on a second generation hardware and software version, which will be ready this summer. He also laid out an aggressive schedule of developing a new major release of hardware and software every six months, hoping to hit a major milestone this year and be the first to market.