The First Humanoid Robotic Unicorn: AI+Robot

Growing to 2.6B valuation in less than 2 years....

Humanoid Robot is in a hot era, investors from VC and industries are pouring money into it.

Figure, a Humanoid Robotics startup, just announced a $675 million series B round, valued the firm at $2.6 billion post-money.

The investors are mind-blowing, including Microsoft, OpenAI Startup Fund, Nvidia, Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, Jeff Bezos, Parkway Venture Capital, Intel Capital, Align Ventures and ARK Invest.

It’s a big milestone for humanoid robotics, I believe:

• Figure partnered with OpenAI to enhance AI models for humanoid robots, focusing on natural language communication.

• Microsoft's investment will provide Figure access to Azure for storage, training, and AI infrastructure.

• Figure's progress includes building a walking bipedal robot and signing a deal with BMW for robotics deployment.

• The company's robot operates at 16.7% the speed of a human, emphasizing deliberate and methodical movements.

Months ago, another Humanoid Robotics startup 1X raised $100 million in a series B round, led by EQT ventures. Interestingly, OpenAI Startup Fund and Tiger Global co-led its series A round in March 2023.

Serial entrepreneur Brett Adcock founded figure in 2022, who previously is the Founder of Archer ($2.7B IPO) and Vettery ($100M exit).

Figure’s mission is to expand human capabilities through advanced AI. Earlier this week, the company released a video showing Figure 01 can do a lot of tasks in the real world, just operates at 16.7% the speed of a human.

Last month, the company demonstrated Figure 01 making coffee only using neural networks. That is a fully learned, end-to-end visuomotor policy mapping onboard images to low-level actions at 200hz.

There are many other players in the Humanoid Robotics market, last month, Cern Basher shared a mapping of the market, while seven of the companies on the list are Chinese. You can see more details here.

In Jan 2024, Bill Gates also released a list of robotics startups that he’s excited about, 3 of which are humanoid robots, including Agility Robotics, Apptronik and RoMeLa.

Bill Gates's words about Agility:

If we want robots to operate in our environments as seamlessly as possible, perhaps those robots should be modeled after people. That’s what Oregon-based Agility Robotics decided when creating Digit, what they call the “first human-centric, multi-purpose robot made for logistics work.” It’s roughly the same size as a person—it’s designed to work with people, go where we go, and operate in our workflows—but it’s able to carry much heavier loads and extend its “arms” to reach shelves we’d need ladders for.

To Apptronik, Bill Gates said:

What’s more useful: multiple robots that can each do one task over and over, or one robot that can do multiple tasks and learn to do even more? To Apptronik, an Austin-based start-up that spun out of the human-centered robotics lab at the University of Texas, the answer is obvious. So they’re building “general-purpose” humanoid bi-pedal robots like Apollo, which can be programmed to do a wide array of tasks—from carrying boxes in a factory to helping out with household chores. And because it can run software from third parties, Apollo will be just a software update away from new functionalities.

Humanoid Robot, is rising.