Figure raises $675M Series B, partners with OpenAI

Figure, a start-up building humanoid robots, raised $675 million in a Series B round at a $2.6 billion valuation, with investors including Microsoft, the OpenAI Startup Fund, Nvidia, Jeff Bezos’s Bezos Expeditions, Intel Capital, Parkway Venture Capital and ARK Invest. Alongside the raise, Figure signed a collaboration agreement with OpenAI to develop next-generation AI models specifically for humanoid robots, combining OpenAI’s language and reasoning research with Figure’s hardware and robotics engineering.

The deal placed Figure at the centre of the period’s leading argument about embodied AI: that large language models trained on text and images could be adapted to give robots general-purpose reasoning and language understanding, rather than the narrow, hand-coded behaviours that had defined industrial robotics. OpenAI’s Peter Welinder said the company saw “a path with Figure to explore what humanoid robots can achieve when powered by highly capable multimodal models,” while Microsoft said Figure would get access to its Azure AI infrastructure to support deployment. Figure chief executive Brett Adcock said the funding, combined with the OpenAI and Microsoft partnerships, positioned the company to bring “embodied AI into the world,” following Figure’s first commercial agreement with BMW Manufacturing.

The round was notable for who was in it as much as its size: three of the largest players in frontier AI — OpenAI, Microsoft and Nvidia — backing a single humanoid-robotics start-up at a stage when no company in the category had shipped a commercial product at scale. It set a funding benchmark that the humanoid-robot sector referenced repeatedly over the following two years, including in Figure’s own subsequent Series C, which raised over $1 billion at a $39 billion valuation in September 2025 — a roughly fifteen-fold increase in valuation in under nineteen months.