Figure AI

Figure AI was founded in 2022 in Sunnyvale, California, and within a few years became the symbol of the humanoid race. The first robot, Figure 01, was shown in March 2023. Two months later the company raised a $70 million seed round. In January 2024 it announced a collaboration with BMW, and in February 2024 a $675 million round from investors that included Bezos, Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel, Amazon and OpenAI, at a $2.6 billion valuation; a partnership with OpenAI on AI models was announced at the same time. In August 2024 came Figure 02, with hands approaching human grip strength and a built-in VLA model. In May 2025 the company said the robot was supporting production of more than 30,000 vehicles at BMW's Spartanburg plant. In September 2025 it closed a Series C of over $1 billion at a $39 billion valuation, and in October it unveiled Figure 03, a lighter third-generation humanoid. In 2026 the pace picked up: in April it delivered more than 350 Figure 03 units, in July the thousandth robot rolled out of its BotQ factory, and in August the company launched Index, a platform for collecting data on how humans work. September 2026 brought a partnership with Nscale for up to 100,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs. That is the curve: from mockup to series production in under four years.

The portfolio is successive generations of a single platform. Figure 01 from March 2023: 160 cm and 60 kg, 20 kg payload, 5 hours of runtime, tested at BMW Spartanburg and now retired. Figure 02 from August 2024 worked for about 11 months at BMW (1,250 hours, more than 90,000 parts) before its successor replaced it. That successor is Figure 03: 172 cm, 61 kg, 35 degrees of freedom, 20 kg payload and up to 5 hours of work; the manufacturer gives no public price. Separate from it stands Figure 03, an announced home variant with prototype status, no specification and no launch date. In May 2026 the CEO announced a home lease of Figure 03 at $600 a month and the closure of the Figure 04 project. A detailed profile of the model is in “Figure 03: What We Know About Figure AI's Third-Generation Robot”, and the wider category context in humanoid robots. Factory work is also covered in “Humanoid Robots in Factories 2026”. Compare the numbers: from Figure 01 to Figure 03 the payload stayed at 20 kg and the runtime at 5 hours, so the change is about reliability, hands and software rather than raw specs. In August 2026 the company also showed Figure 03 autonomously climbing a ladder.

Figure AI has raised $1.9 billion and is valued at $39 billion, with about 600 employees, a scale most competitors cannot match. In June 2026 the company reported operating 740 robots against 600 human employees in its own facilities. The key customer is BMW Group: according to July 2026 reports, Figure 02 and 03 supported production of more than 30,000 BMW X3s at Spartanburg over ten months. By August 2026 the company had announced a $3.5 billion commitment for Nvidia GPUs. Its rivals are Tesla with Optimus, Agility Robotics with Digit, Apptronik with Apollo, and 1X Technologies and Boston Dynamics. What sets Figure apart is its production rate, around one robot per hour at the BotQ factory, but most of the figures come from the company itself rather than from independent audits. Industry forecasts are collected in “Humanoid Robot Market Forecasts”.

Figure AI has no commercial presence in Poland: no distributor, no Polish price and no announcement of market entry. None of the models is available in the country. We also know of no Polish deployment or project with a Polish university. Polish engineers can at most follow developments, for example in the context of the job market described in “Humanoid Robots and the Polish Labor Market”. Anyone wondering which humanoids can be rented for an event today will find the answer in “Renting a Humanoid Robot for an Event”; Figure is not on that list. The only thing you can realistically do in Poland today is watch the news and prepare your own evaluation criteria.

Figure AI is the best-funded humanoid maker and a real pace-setter: the thousandth Figure 03 in 2026 is production, not a presentation. On the Polish market, however, it does not exist, and the home variant is still a prototype without a launch date. Recommendation: follow it as a benchmark for the whole industry, and plan a purchase only once an official offer appears in Europe. Factory applications: “Factories and manufacturing”. Anyone who wants a humanoid working in a Polish factory will have to look elsewhere for now.