Figure's human-video app hits 37.5M uploads as it spends $8.1M a week on data
Figure AI's Index app has collected 37.5 million human videos from 112 countries, 2.3 times the 16 million it reported at launch on Aug 25, and the company spent an estimated $8.1 million on data in a single week, CEO Brett Adcock said in a recorded all-hands meeting Figure published on YouTube on Oct 22, according to Humanoids Daily's account.
Adcock also said Figure 04 is in design lock, the 1,000th Figure 03 was built this summer and cash tops $2 billion; Figure has not put these figures in a written release.
Figure AI is now paying for human video at a rate that would have looked absurd for a robot company a year ago. In a 61-minute recording of an internal all-hands meeting that Figure posted to its YouTube channel on Oct 22, chief executive Brett Adcock put the company's estimated data spending for one recent week at $8.1 million, according to a detailed account by the trade site Humanoids Daily. MEKAWIRE confirmed that the video exists on Figure's channel but could not review its contents, so the figures below are reported, not confirmed by Figure in writing.
What Adcock reported
The numbers centre on Index, the app through which Figure pays people to film themselves doing everyday tasks. Adcock reported 37.5 million uploaded videos, 1.26 million app downloads across 112 countries and 210,000 people who uploaded at least one video in the preceding week. On hardware, he said Figure built its 1,000th Figure 03 over the summer, cut costs by more than 90% between Figure 02 and Figure 03 without giving an absolute cost, and that Figure 04 has reached design lock, with its actuators running in the test lab, ten full battery packs brought up and load and thermal tests to follow. He reported a cash balance above $2 billion after additional capital, without terms, said Figure robots operate in three US states and teased a Helix 3.0 model without benchmarks or a date.
How fast Index has grown since August
Figure's own launch post of Aug 25 gives a clean baseline: more than 16 million videos, 264,000 downloads in 108 countries, over 44,000 weekly active contributors and $15 million paid to creators to date. Against that, the reported Oct 22 numbers imply uploads up 2.3 times and downloads up 4.8 times in 58 days.
- Uploaded videos
- 16 million+
- 37.5 million
- 2.3x
- App downloads
- 264,000
- 1.26 million
- 4.8x
- Countries
- 108
- 112
- +4
- Weekly contributors
- 44,000+ weekly active
- 210,000 uploaders in a week
- 4.8x (definitions differ)
- Money to creators or data
- $15M paid to date
- $8.1M in one week (est.)
- n/a
Change = Oct 22 value divided by Aug 25 value. Oct 22 figures are as reported by Humanoids Daily from Figure's all-hands video; Aug 25 figures from Figure's Index launch post.
As of Oct 25, 2026
MEKAWIRE analysis
Figure is turning robot learning into a data procurement business, and the weekly bill already rivals a mid-size funding round.
One week at $8.1 million is 54% of everything Figure had paid creators in the four months before launch. If sustained, it annualises to about $421 million, which fits the more than $1 billion Figure pledged in August to spend on data and compute over 12 months, alongside the Nscale compute deal that starts at $3.5 billion. Nscale's Sept 18 S-1 filing confirms the Aug 24 agreement for up to 100,000 NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs from the second half of 2027 and a strategic investment in Figure. The reported cash balance also exceeds the $1.745 billion total of Figure's three disclosed rounds in our database, consistent with Adcock's remark about new capital. Rivals are buying the same input differently: Maxinsights pays more than 5,000 contractors and sells over 2 million hours to labs such as Genesis AI and Dyna. The counter-argument is the one Figure's own Helix 2.5 test exposes: 56% task success in unseen homes shows the data helps, but uploads are not cleaned training data and the reliability gap remains.
Why it matters
For buyers of humanoids, volume of human data is becoming the main competitive variable, and it favours companies with billions in cash. What would change our view is a Helix 3.0 release with a measured jump in success rate over Helix 2.5; without it, the spending is a bet, not a result. Watch for Helix 3.0 results, Figure 04 unveiling details and any written confirmation of the new capital. See our Figure AI explainer and the company profile.
- Above $2 billion after additional capital, terms not disclosed
- All-hands recording on Figure's YouTube channel, Oct 22, 2026; figures via Humanoids Daily
- 1,000th Figure 03 built this summer; Figure 04 in design lock
- About $8.1 million in one week (estimate, reported)
- 1.26 million in 112 countries vs 264,000 in 108
- 37.5 million videos (reported Oct 22) vs 16 million at Aug 25 launch
- 210,000 uploaders in one week vs 44,000 weekly active at launch