What is Figure AI? The $39 billion humanoid maker's funding, robots and customers explained
Figure AI is a San Jose company that builds general-purpose humanoid robots, the Figure 03, and the Helix AI model that controls them; it was valued at $39 billion after a Series C of more than $1 billion in September 2025, the highest disclosed private valuation of any robot maker in MEKAWIRE's database.
Its named customers are BMW, where the robots work at the Spartanburg plant, and retailer group Catalyst Brands, and in April 2026 it said its BotQ factory had delivered more than 350 Figure 03 robots at a rate of one per hour.
Figure AI is a San Jose company that makes a general-purpose humanoid robot, the Figure 03, and the Helix neural network that runs it. Investors valued it at $39 billion after a Series C of more than $1 billion in September 2025, the highest disclosed private valuation of any robot maker in MEKAWIRE's database and almost three times the next one, Skild AI at $14 billion.
That price rests on a short commercial record: one automotive plant, one retail logistics agreement and a few hundred robots built. This explainer sets out what Figure has verifiably done, what it has raised, and what the valuation assumes.
Three rounds took Figure from $70 million to a $39 billion price tag
Figure's own announcements show three priced rounds. A $70 million Series A led by Parkway Venture Capital in May 2023; a $675 million Series B in February 2024 that Figure said valued it at $2.6 billion, with Microsoft, the OpenAI Startup Fund, NVIDIA, Intel Capital, Bezos Expeditions and ARK Invest among the investors; and a Series C of more than $1 billion in committed capital, again led by Parkway, at a $39 billion post-money valuation, with Brookfield Asset Management, NVIDIA, Macquarie Capital, LG Technology Ventures, Salesforce, T-Mobile Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures.
- 2023-05-24
- Series A
- 70m
- not disclosed
- Parkway Venture Capital
- 2024-02-29
- Series B
- 675m
- 2.6bn (stated by Figure)
- not named
- 2025-09-16
- Series C
- more than 1bn
- 39bn post-money
- Parkway Venture Capital
Sources: Figure press releases. Disclosed figures only. Capital raised to date at least $1.745bn; Series B to C valuation step-up 15.0x in 18.5 months.
As of Oct 16, 2026
In September 2026 Figure added a compute deal rather than a round: Nscale agreed to deploy up to 100,000 NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs for Figure from the second half of 2027 in Texas, an initial $3.5 billion commitment Figure says it intends to scale past $6 billion, and Nscale also made an undisclosed strategic investment. The money question has moved from robots to training.
What the robots actually do today
The production robot is Figure 03, launched in October 2025. MEKAWIRE's spec sheet, built from Figure's pages, lists 173 cm height, 61 kg weight, 20 kg payload, about five hours of runtime from a 2.3 kWh battery, palm cameras and fingertip tactile sensors. Its predecessor Figure 02 ran ten-hour weekday shifts at BMW Group Plant Spartanburg loading sheet-metal parts onto weld fixtures; Figure said in November 2025 that it loaded more than 90,000 parts over 1,250 hours and contributed to the production of more than 30,000 BMW X3s. In June 2026 Figure 03 moved into Hall 52 at the same plant on a harder sequencing job, sorting thin-walled parts and pulling a loaded cart.
The second named customer is Catalyst Brands, the retail group behind JCPenney and Brooks Brothers, which signed in May 2026 to start at its Reno distribution centre. Brookfield is an investor in both companies. Figure has not disclosed contract values, robot counts per site or pricing.
BotQ and Helix are the two bets inside the company
Figure builds its robots itself at BotQ. On April 29, 2026 it said BotQ had delivered more than 350 Figure 03 units and raised output from one robot a day to one an hour in under 120 days, with end-of-line first-pass yield above 80% and more than 9,000 actuators made in-house. On Sept 30 it said it was retiring the remaining Figure 02 fleet ahead of a Figure 04.
Helix is the vision-language-action model that turns camera pixels into whole-body motion. Helix 02 (January 2026) coordinated hands, arms, torso and feet; Helix 2.5 (September 2026) was pretrained on Index, Figure's crowd-sourced video dataset, and Figure says it tidied rooms, folded towels and made beds in 30 Bay Area homes it had never seen, with no data collected there. Those are company demonstrations, not independent benchmarks. Index itself had 16 million uploaded videos and $15 million paid to contributors by August 2026, and Figure said it would spend more than $1 billion on data and compute over the following 12 months.
How Figure compares with the rest of the humanoid field
- Figure AI
- US
- Series C
- 2025-09-16
- more than 1bn
- 39bn
- Skild AI
- US
- Series C
- 2026-01-14
- 1.4bn
- 14bn
- Physical Intelligence
- US
- Series B
- 2025-11-20
- 600m
- 5.6bn
- Agility Robotics
- US
- Series C closings
- 2025-06-25
- 162m
- 2bn
- Apptronik
- US
- Series A extension
- 2026-02-11
- 520m
- not disclosed
MEKAWIRE database, verified rows only; Agility has since agreed a SPAC merger. Skild AI and Physical Intelligence build robot models rather than humanoid hardware.
As of Oct 16, 2026
The gap in price is far larger than the gap in output. IDC counted almost 25,000 humanoid shipments worldwide in the first half of 2026, more than 95% from Chinese makers; Figure's disclosed 350-plus units are a small slice of that. Agility, the other US humanoid maker with a factory customer, last priced its equity at $2 billion and is now going public through a SPAC.
MEKAWIRE analysis
Figure is priced as an AI model company that happens to build its own robot, and the valuation will be justified by Helix generalising across sites, not by BotQ volume.
The numbers support that reading. From the Series B to the Series C the valuation rose 15 times in 18.5 months, while the commercial base grew from a pilot to one plant and the capital raised rose 2.3 times. The $3.5 billion compute commitment is more than double all equity Figure has disclosed. Investors are paying for the chance that one model learns from every deployment, the same logic that priced Skild AI and Physical Intelligence, both robot-software companies without large fleets.
The strongest counter-argument is that hardware still decides. Chinese makers ship humanoids by the thousand at a fraction of the price, and a model that generalises is worth less if the robot carrying it costs several times more. Figure's answer is vertical integration, but its first-pass yield of just over 80% shows the factory is still learning.
Bull case: Helix 2.5's home results carry over to paying warehouse and factory sites, BotQ reaches thousands of units a year, and the BMW and Catalyst sites expand to named fleets. Bear case: deployments stay at pilot scale, the compute bill arrives before revenue, and the next round prices below $39 billion.
Signals to watch: a disclosed robot count or contract at BMW or Catalyst; the Figure 04 launch and its bill of materials; and the first Nscale GPUs coming online in the second half of 2027.
Method: valuation step-up = Series C post-money ($39bn) / Series B valuation stated by Figure ($2.6bn). Capital raised = sum of disclosed round amounts, Series C at its stated floor of $1bn. As of 2026-10-16; disclosed figures only, nothing estimated.
- Nscale deal for up to 100,000 NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs, $3.5bn initial commitment, from H2 2027
- Valuation up 15x from Series B to Series C in 18.5 months (MEKAWIRE calculation)
- $39 billion post-money after a Series C of more than $1 billion (Sept 16, 2025)
- Figure 02 loaded 90,000+ parts and contributed to 30,000+ X3s; Figure 03 in Hall 52 since June 2026
- 350+ Figure 03 delivered by Apr 29, 2026; BotQ at one robot per hour
- US maker of the Figure 03 general-purpose humanoid and the Helix vision-language-action model, based in San Jose
- Parkway Venture Capital led the Series A and Series C
- BMW Group Plant Spartanburg; Catalyst Brands (Reno distribution centre)
- At least $1.745 billion across Series A ($70m), B ($675m) and C (more than $1bn)
Why it matters
Figure sets the price reference for the whole humanoid category. Every later round, from Apptronik to Korean and European makers, is benchmarked against the $39 billion mark, so whether Figure grows into it shapes the cost of capital for the sector.
It is also the clearest test of the thesis that a single vision-language-action model can be reused across factories, warehouses and homes. If Helix generalises, the value sits in the model; if it does not, the value shifts back to whoever makes cheap, reliable hardware.
Rival analysis
Agility Robotics is the closest operational rival: a factory and logistics humanoid with paying customers, priced at $2 billion and heading to a public listing, which will give the market its first daily price for a US humanoid maker. Apptronik has raised $923 million in verified rounds with Google DeepMind as a model partner but no disclosed valuation. Tesla's Optimus is the in-house rival with its own factories as the customer.
On the model side Skild AI and Physical Intelligence sell or license robot brains for other people's hardware, which is the opposite strategy to Figure's closed stack. In China, AgiBot, Unitree and UBTech ship far more units at lower prices.
Valuation context
At $39 billion Figure is valued at roughly 2.8 times Skild AI and 19.5 times Agility's last private price, on fewer disclosed robots than the leading Chinese makers ship in a month. Unitree, the only listed pure humanoid and quadruped maker in our database, reported 2025 revenue of RMB1.70 billion.
Figure has disclosed no revenue. The valuation is therefore a bet on future model economics, comparable to how AI labs are priced, rather than a multiple of current sales.
Supply-chain implications
Figure makes its own actuators (more than 9,000 across over 10 SKUs by April 2026) and battery packs at BotQ, which lowers dependence on Japanese reducer makers and Chinese joint-module suppliers that most rivals use. Compute is the new dependency: the Nscale agreement ties its training roadmap to NVIDIA Vera Rubin deliveries in Texas from late 2027.
Signals to watch
1. A disclosed fleet size or contract value at BMW Spartanburg or Catalyst Brands. 2. The Figure 04 launch and any price or bill-of-materials figure. 3. First Nscale GPUs online in H2 2027 and the Helix release trained on them. 4. Agility's post-listing trading price as a public comparable.
Analyst view
Thesis: Figure is priced as an AI model company and will be judged on Helix, not on BotQ volume. Confidence: medium. The production ramp and BMW record are real and verified, but the generalisation results are company demonstrations, and there is no disclosed revenue to anchor the price.
Questions you should be asking
How many Figure 03 robots are deployed at paying customers, and at what price per robot or per hour? What share of the $3.5 billion Nscale commitment is funded by equity already raised? What does Figure 04 change in cost and runtime? How is Index data licensed and quality-checked?