Robotics Startup Figure Receives $675 Million Investment

Robotics startup Figure said it raised $675 million at a valuation of $2.6 billion from investors including Nvidia, Microsoft and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. Sunnyvale, California-based Figure also said it has signed a collaboration with OpenAI to develop productive artificial intelligence for its humanoid robots.

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Figure

The launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI has increased interest in artificial intelligence. Companies have also invested millions of dollars to profit from this trend. It includes OpenAI Startup Fund, Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, Parkway Venture Capital, Intel Capital, Align Ventures and ARK Invest. Figure founder and CEO Brett Adcock said the company will use the funding to develop broad language models for robotics, accelerate production and hire more people. Adcock said the startup will also move to Microsoft Azure for artificial intelligence infrastructure and training. According to Adcock, the artificial intelligence models developed by Figure will be based on OpenAI's latest GPT models. They will be specially trained on robotic action data collected by Figure so that its humanoid robots can talk to people, see things and perform physical tasks.

Humanoid robots have renewed investor interest as AI-powered software offers more possibilities for how robots interact and work with humans. Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk has predicted that there will be one billion humanoid robots on Earth by the 2040s, with the electric car maker launching its latest humanoid Optimus Gen in development. It signed a partnership with BMW Manufacturing to deploy its humanoid robots at the carmaker's facility in the US.