An AI (Artificial Intelligence) company named ‘Figure’ that works on building humanoid robots has drawn $675 million in investments from the Open AI Startup Fund, Microsoft, Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions), NVIDIA, Intel Capital, Parkway Venture Capital, ARK Invest, and Align Ventures. With this investment, the Humanoid Robot Figure commercial market is valued at $2.6 billion.
Along with this investment, Figure and Open AI have also signed a collaboration agreement to develop next-generation AI models for humanoid robots. This agreement will utilize Figure’s deep understanding of robotics software and hardware, hand in hand with Open AI’s research. It will also help to raise Figure’s commercial market by improving the humanoid robot’s capabilities to reason and process language. Must Read: Meet the Top 9 Robotics Scientists Shaping the Future
Peter Welinder, VP of Product and Partnerships at Open AI said, “We’ve always planned to come back to robotics, and we see a path with Figure to explore what humanoid robots can achieve when powered by skillful multimodal models. We’re blown away by Figure’s progress and look forward to working together to open up new possibilities for how robots can help in everyday life.”
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Figure wants to use this capital strategically for robot manufacturing, scaling up AI training, advancing commercial deployment efforts, and expanding engineering headcounts. The company also released a video of Figure 01, a humanoid robot, wherein they could be seen performing some basic tasks.
In the past few months, Figure has made significant progress in special areas of robot development, AI, commercialization, and robot testing with the help of robotics experts from Tesla, Boston Dynamics, Archer Aviation, and Google DeepMind.
Figure plans to contact and collaborate with Microsoft Azure for AI training, infrastructure, and storage. Jon Tinter, Corporate Vice President of Business Development at Microsoft, said, “We are excited to collaborate with Figure and work towards accelerating AI breakthroughs. Through our work together, Figure will have access to Microsoft’s AI infrastructure and services to support the deployment of humanoid robots to assist people with real-world applications.”
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Brett Adcock, Founder and CEO of Figure said “Our vision at Figure is to bring humanoid robots into commercial operations as soon as possible. This investment, combined with our partnership with OpenAI and Microsoft, ensures that we are well-prepared to bring embodied AI into the world to make a transformative impact on humanity. AI and robotics are the future, and I am grateful to have the support of investors and partners who believe in being at the forefront.”
About Figure
Figure was founded 21 months ago, based in Sunnyvale, California with a strength of 80 employees. It is an AI-based Robotics company working to build humanoid robots for general purpose. Figure aims to develop and design humanoid robots for workforce deployment to deal with labor shortage issues, and provide support to supply chains on a global scale and undesirable or Unsafe jobs.
