With a valuation of $39 billion, the world's highest valuation for embodied AI has emerged, and NVIDIA is continuously increasing its investment.

After parting ways with OpenAI, Figure has not only made continuous technological progress but also achieved new developments in financing.

According to the latest news, in its Series C financing, Figure has secured over $1 billion in committed capital, and its post - investment valuation has reached a staggering $39 billion, setting the highest valuation record in the current publicly available information for the embodied intelligence track.

This round of financing was led by Parkway Venture Capital. NVIDIA continued to increase its investment, and Brookfield Asset Management, Macquarie Capital, Intel Capital, Align Ventures, Tamarack Global, LG Technology Ventures, Salesforce, T - Mobile Ventures, GaoTong Venture Capital, etc. also participated.

While announcing the good news, Figure also issued a "recruitment notice", opening recruitment in 13 areas such as AI - Helix, BotQ manufacturing, electrical engineering, facilities, and operations.

The funds will support three core layouts

It is reported that the new round of financing will support Figure's development in three core areas.

Firstly, it is to promote the large - scale penetration of humanoid robots into household and commercial scenarios.

Figure said it is expanding the production scale and real - world deployment scope of its large - scale humanoid robot manufacturing factory, BotQ, enabling robots to assist in household chores and labor - related tasks in the commercial field.

Well, care to elaborate?

For example, some time ago, founder Brett Adcock posted a video of a Figure robot folding clothes, which attracted a large number of netizens:

(So much work, never ending. You deserve a thumbs up!)

Even earlier, it sorted express packages in a factory:

When shifting from working in the logistics scenario to the task of folding clothes, the Figure robot relies on an end - to - end neural network -

Without any architectural changes, without modifying the model or training hyperparameters, and simply by adding data, it easily learned new skills. The entire process operates in an end - to - end manner.

The key behind this is the Helix architecture.

Helix is the first achievement after Figure parted ways with OpenAI. It is an end - to - end "vision - language - action" model (VLA) suitable for general humanoid robot control, enabling robots to perceive, understand, and act like humans.

Helix consists of two systems. The two systems are trained end - to - end and can communicate with each other.

It can achieve strong performance in various tasks through a single unified model. Using only one set of neural network weights, it can accurately pick and place items in different containers, flexibly operate drawers and refrigerators, coordinate multiple robots to complete dexterous handovers, and even proficiently manipulate thousands of new objects.

In the package sorting task, the research team also made targeted improvements to the architecture of Helix's visual - motor strategy, introducing new memory and sensing modules to better help the robot perceive environmental changes.

The newly raised funds will also revolve around Helix. In the official words:

Figure's layout in all fields aims to fully unleash the capabilities of the embodied intelligence AI system, Helix.

Therefore, the second use of the funds is to build the next - generation GPU infrastructure to accelerate training and simulation. This computing foundation will provide computing power support for the core models of Helix in perception, reasoning, and control.

The third use is to launch an advanced data collection project, including collecting videos of human activities and multi - modal sensory input data to improve the robot's understanding and operation ability in complex and dynamic environments. These real - world scenario datasets are crucial for improving the performance of Helix.

Who is Figure?

Figure was founded in May 2022. Founder Bret Adcock is a serial entrepreneur.

In February 2024, Figure successfully completed its Series B financing, attracting industry giants and well - known institutions such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and NVIDIA. The financing amount reached $675 million, and the company's valuation climbed to $2.6 billion at that time. With this, Figure quickly joined the ranks of the most - watched humanoid robot companies.

Even more remarkably, when ChatGPT was at its peak, Figure signed an agreement with OpenAI, announcing a cooperation to develop the next - generation AI model to improve the humanoid robot's language processing and reasoning abilities.

In March 2024, Figure posted the first demonstration video of Figure 01 powered by OpenAI's large - scale model on X.

Just five months later, Figure 02 was launched, with both hardware and software completely redesigned.

In cooperation with OpenAI, Figure 02 also trained a customized AI model and is equipped with a microphone and speaker to conduct voice conversations with humans.

However, in February this year, Figure suddenly terminated its contract with OpenAI.

Founder Brett Adcock said there had been a major breakthrough in the internal end - to - end robot AI.

According to Techcrunch, the problem with the contract termination lies in the integration of the AI model into the robot hardware.

Rather than using OpenAI's model, Figure now prefers to vertically integrate robot AI and build an end - to - end AI model specifically for specific robot hardware.

After parting ways with OpenAI, Figure has been making rapid progress. Just a few days later, it released Helix, which is the "major breakthrough" mentioned by Brett Adcock earlier.

One More Thing

Let's take a look at the latest financing valuations of the unicorns in the embodied intelligence track. What's the situation?

Valuation echelon of over $10 billion:

Figure secured over $1 billion in committed capital in its Series C financing, with a post - investment valuation of $39 billion.

Valuation echelon of over 10 billion RMB:

Physical Intelligence (π) officially announced a new round of $400 million financing in November 2024, with a pre - investment valuation of about $2 billion.

ZhiYuan Robotics has raised billions of RMB in less than 3 years since its establishment, and its valuation has long exceeded 10 billion RMB.

Unitree Robotics has completed the Series C financing, and its valuation has reached 10 billion RMB.

Valuation echelon of over $1 billion:

Galaxy Universal has raised over 2.4 billion RMB in two years, with a valuation of over 7 billion RMB.

DeepRobotics has raised a total of 1 billion RMB, with a valuation of 7 billion RMB.

Reference links:

[1]https://x.com/Figure_robot/status/1967936969482342891

[2]http://figure.ai/news/series-c

This article is from the WeChat official account "QbitAI", author: Xifeng. It is published by 36Kr with authorization.