Wang Xingxing's rival, valued at 270 billion yuan

The world's most valuable humanoid robot company has emerged.

According to the latest news, Figure announced the completion of a $1 billion Series C financing round, with a post - investment valuation of $39 billion (approximately 270 billion RMB), breaking the global valuation record for humanoid robot companies.

Actually, in the past period, when domestic investors talked about Unitree, they often mentioned Figure - founded in 2022 with a valuation of tens of billions, which is quite astonishing. In contrast, the valuations of domestic embodied intelligence startups seem much more conservative.

What is less well - known is that many of the components of Figure's current products come from Chinese manufacturing companies. More interestingly, Figure's founder, Brett Adcock, once publicly talked about Wang Xingxing's Unitree Technology and admitted feeling the competitive pressure from Chinese peers.

The world's most valuable humanoid robot, valued at 270 billion

If we look back two or three years ago, hardly anyone thought that Figure would grow into a unicorn worth tens of billions in the future.

Founded in 2022, Figure was initially out of investors' sight. "After countless speeches, I couldn't find a real venture capitalist willing to invest," founder Brett Adcock recalled the difficult early days of the startup. The company hadn't found the product - market fit and was rejected by almost all technology investors.

"Our idea was to go all out to build a humanoid robot." They calculated that at the current rate of capital consumption, which was $1 million per month, they had to make progress as soon as possible. So, within less than 12 months after the company was founded, the Figure team designed most of the components of the humanoid robot from scratch.

Investors started to come knocking.

In May 2023, Figure completed a $70 million Series A financing round, led by Parkway Venture Capital, with participating investors including Aliya Capital, Bold Ventures, Tamarack Global, FJ Labs, and Till Reuter, the former CEO of KUKA Robotics. Two months later, it received an additional $9 million investment from Big Sky Partners and Intel Capital.

The bigger turning point was that the external environment of the industry underwent a drastic change - embodied intelligence caught the wave. Amid the trend, humanoid robots are regarded as one of the most promising future tracks, and investors flocked to it.

Figure became a hot commodity. In February 2024, the company announced the completion of a Series B financing round of approximately $675 million. Among them, Bezos promised to invest $100 million through his company Explore Investments LLC, Microsoft invested $95 million, and Nvidia and an Amazon affiliated fund each invested $50 million. After this round of financing, Figure's valuation soared to $2.6 billion.

With a valuation of tens of billions after two years of entrepreneurship, such achievements are already quite remarkable. Unexpectedly, this was just the beginning of the story.

At the beginning of this year, there were rumors that Figure was seeking to raise $1 billion to $2 billion at a valuation of $40 billion. Now it has come to light - Figure officially announced that it has received over $1 billion in committed funds for its Series C financing, with a post - investment valuation of $39 billion (approximately 270 billion RMB).

The investment lineup for this round is luxurious: led by Parkway Venture Capital, Brookfield Asset Management, Nvidia, Macquarie Capital, Intel Capital, Align Ventures, Tamarack Global, LG Technology Ventures, Salesforce, T - Mobile Ventures, and Qualcomm Ventures also participated in the investment.

In other words, in just one and a half years, Figure's valuation has increased 15 times.

With sufficient funds, Figure said it will accelerate the commercialization process of its general - purpose humanoid robots and use them in three aspects: promoting the entry of humanoid robots into the household and commercial operation fields, building the next - generation GPU infrastructure to accelerate training and simulation, and initiating advanced data collection work.

Currently, commercial exploration lies ahead for all embodied intelligence companies. As Brett Adcock said, "The team, product, and roadmap are all ready. Now is the best time to achieve a breakthrough."

A 39 - year - old serial entrepreneur, and his robots face doubts

Figure's founder, Brett Adcock, can be called a "serial entrepreneur."

Born in 1986, Brett Adcock grew up in a farm family. Influenced by his parents, he started trying to start a business in middle school. In 2012, he founded an online talent market company called Vettery, which was later acquired by a Swiss company for $100 million.

This allowed Brett Adcock to earn his first pot of gold. Later, seeing the opportunity in the electrification wave, Brett Adcock invested all his funds in a new startup - he founded an eVTOL company called Archer Aviation, which produces all - electric vertical take - off and landing aircraft and went public at the end of 2020, with a current market value of $5.7 billion (approximately 40 billion RMB).

Until 2022, Brett Adcock announced his resignation from the company's board of directors and founded Figure. He wrote on the company's official website: "Figure, looking forward to the next 30 years." In his view, humanoid robots are the ultimate form of AGI, which is the goal of founding Figure.

As the saying goes, investing is about investing in people. In the eyes of the outside world, Brett Adcock's entrepreneurial process is quite similar to Elon Musk's early days of founding SpaceX, and he has thus earned the title of "Elon Musk 2.0." In October 2023, Figure's first humanoid robot, Figure 01, was unveiled. It can not only perform simple physical tasks such as moving boxes but also learn to make coffee by observing human demonstrations.

This "self - learning" mode of the robot is more efficient than Tesla's method of transmitting data to the robot and is considered to outperform Musk's Optimus, attracting the attention of global technology giants.

Another key asset of Figure is its self - developed robot AI model - Helix.

Figure's robots were previously equipped with OpenAI's large - scale model. However, realizing that artificial intelligence is the key to general - purpose robots, in February this year, Figure terminated its cooperation with OpenAI and subsequently launched a VLA model called Helix. In Figure's demonstration, with the support of Helix, AI was able to control two robots simultaneously for the first time, enabling them to cooperate with a shared "brain," which caused a sensation at the time.

However, doubts from the outside world followed. Previously, Figure announced that it had signed a major customer, BMW. But later, foreign media questioned that there was actually only one Figure robot operating in the BMW factory during non - production hours, suggesting there was a suspicion of exaggerated publicity of the cooperation. In the subsequent response video, Brett Adcock only showed one Figure robot busy on the BMW production line.

In the past period, the outside world's understanding of Figure's robots was limited to the demonstration videos frequently posted on social networks. How about their practical operation ability? No one has seen it in public. And competitors are already eyeing the competition in AI model capabilities. To meet the challenges, Figure has announced that it will cooperate with its Series C investor Brookfield to help Helix develop pre - trained datasets.

Ultimately, with a valuation of tens of billions, people hope to see more.

"Unitree and others are undervalued"

The news reached across the ocean - on September 17, the A - share robot sector continued its strong performance, triggering another wave of limit - up stocks. With the frequent updates on Tesla's Optimus and domestic robot manufacturers winning large orders one after another, Chinese humanoid robot concept stocks have witnessed a sharp rise recently.

Figure is undoubtedly one of the catalysts for this trend. You may not know that behind this unicorn worth tens of billions, there is a group of Chinese manufacturing enterprises:

A research report released by HSBC shows that in Figure's supply chain, Changying Precision provides key components such as joints, bearings, and sensors for Figure; Green Harmonic provides harmonic reducers; Xusheng Group supplies magnesium alloy casings; and Zhaowei Electromechanical provides brushless motors...

This is not surprising.

Actually, whether it is domestic up - and - comers like Unitree Technology and Zhipu Robotics or overseas giants like Tesla's Optimus and Boston Dynamics, they all rely on the in - depth participation of Chinese supply - chain enterprises. For example, Tuopu Group and Sanhua Intelligent Control from Zhejiang are the two major Tier - 1 suppliers for Tesla's humanoid robots. Recently, Elon Musk admitted the challenges of expanding the production scale of Optimus - he has to build the supply chain from scratch.

This is precisely an opportunity for domestic manufacturers to break through. Looking around, China's manufacturing industry has ranked first in the world in terms of overall scale for 15 consecutive years; among the world's 504 major industrial products, China ranks first in the production of most of them. From the Yangtze River Delta to the Pearl River Delta, there are tens of thousands of industrial chain and supply - chain enterprises. In this wave of embodied intelligence, many investors have come to Shenzhen to look for hardware projects because of the cluster advantage of "hardware innovation + manufacturing support" here.

It is those seemingly insignificant reducers, sensors, and screws that have created a unique environment for the growth of domestic robots. A report from Morgan Stanley points out that among the world's 100 key humanoid robot enterprises, 56 are from China. In the view of industry insiders, China has the world's largest application market and the strongest cost - advantage in manufacturing. It can be seen that since this year, leading robot enterprises such as Unitree Technology, Zhipu Robotics, and Ubtech have won large orders one after another, with a very obvious cost - advantage, and every step is inseparable from China's supply - chain capabilities.

Previously, the domestic embodied intelligence track was once shrouded in the sound of bubbles. But when Figure achieved a valuation of tens of billions, everything seems to make sense. After all, the pre - investment valuation of Unitree Technology, which has been very popular this year, was in the tens of billions during its financing in June. "Unitree and others may be undervalued."

Back to Figure, they have already noticed their Chinese competitors. Previously, Brett Adcock talked about Unitree Technology in an interview and highly praised these Chinese competitors in the robot field. In his view, the advantages of Chinese engineering teams in terms of low cost and high efficiency will make China one of the main competitors in global robot technology in the future.

He also predicted that "only a few teams will ultimately succeed." It is certain that Chinese players will definitely be part of the picture.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Investment World" (ID: pedaily2012), written by Wu Qiong and published by 36Kr with authorization.