Figure AI
Figure
Figure AI is a humanoid robotics startup founded in 2022 that builds general-purpose humanoid robots, per a 2025 FreeS Research piece tracing the sector's third wave . The company gained wide attention in March 2024 when it released a demo of its Figure 01 robot integrated with OpenAI's large model, enabling conversational interaction and task execution—developed just thirteen days after the partnership was announced, as 云启资本 noted at the time . Figure 01 stands roughly 170cm tall, weighs 60kg, and can carry 20kg loads .
The company's trajectory moved quickly from demonstration to commercial foothold: by early 2024 it had already signed an agreement with BMW to deploy robots at the Spartanburg, South Carolina plant , and by August 2024 it unveiled the significantly upgraded Figure 02 with tripled on-board AI inference capability . In 2025 it introduced Helix, a vision-language-action (VLA) model aimed at generalizing across scene tasks . More recently, in May 2026, Figure conducted a 191-hour continuous livestream of its F.03 robot running the Helix-02 model, autonomously completing 23.8 tasks .
The startup has drawn talent from top robotics labs—one 峰瑞资本 interview featured a former Figure AI technical director who had worked on dexterous manipulation and algorithm development before returning to China in 2023 —and has been backed by OpenAI, which also invested in rival Physical Intelligence around the same period . 星尘智能, a Chinese peer, has been described in the industry as "China's Figure" for following a comparable full-stack architecture approach .
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Coverage
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