Figure AI CEO, building humanoid robots
Brett Adcock
Profile
Brett Adcock is the founder and CEO of Figure AI, the Sunnyvale startup trying to put general-purpose humanoid robots on factory floors and, eventually, in your kitchen. He is not a roboticist by training. He grew up on a third-generation farm in Illinois, studied business at the University of Florida, and built his career as a serial founder: Vettery, an AI-powered talent marketplace he sold to Adecco for $110M in 2018, and Archer Aviation, the eVTOL company he co-founded the same year. Figure is his third act, and the most ambitious.
He started Figure in May 2022 and hired aggressively out of Boston Dynamics (where Marc Raibert built the playbook), Tesla, Google DeepMind, and Apple. The original thesis was a humanoid + LLM mashup, and the early viral demo — Figure 01 parsing a conversational instruction to identify food and hand over an apple — ran on a partnership with OpenAI. Adcock killed that partnership in February 2025, declaring that language was the easy part and that high-rate robot control required an end-to-end vertically integrated stack. He bet the company on an in-house Vision-Language-Action model called Helix, which runs onboard the robot on low-power GPUs.
That bet looks like it’s paying off, at least commercially. Figure 03 launched in October 2025, the BotQ factory is scaling toward 50,000 units per year, and Figure 02s have been running 10-hour shifts at BMW’s Spartanburg plant. The company raised around $1.9B at a ~$39B valuation as of early 2026, putting it near the top of the humanoid pile alongside Tesla’s Optimus and 1X. Adcock himself is now listed as a paper billionaire.
For a developer watching this space, Adcock is the clearest case study in “what happens when an LLM-era founder tries to build embodied AI.” He’s brash, picks fights with rivals on X, and ships videos faster than anyone else in humanoids — which means you should read every demo with a little skepticism and a lot of curiosity. If Helix and its successors actually generalize, Figure is the company most likely to put a VLA-controlled robot in a real building near you first.
Key Articles & Papers
Helix: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Generalist Humanoid Control Master Plan Figure Ends Collaboration Agreement with OpenAI Figure AI CEO skips live demo, sidesteps BMW deal questions onstage Figure AI sued by whistleblower over 'skull-fracturing' robot safety claimsVideos
Controversies
Safety whistleblower lawsuit (November 2025). Robert Gruendel, Figure’s former principal robotic safety engineer, sued the company alleging he was fired in retaliation for raising safety concerns, including that Figure’s robots had force output capable of fracturing a human skull and that an emergency-stop certification project was cancelled to save time. Figure has denied the allegations. CNBC coverage.
BMW deployment claims. A Fortune investigation and follow-up reporting questioned whether Adcock’s public framing of the BMW Spartanburg partnership overstated a relatively small-scale feasibility pilot. Adcock pushed back aggressively, including threats of legal action against the reporting. Fortune/Yahoo summary.
Autonomy vs teleop skepticism. After demo footage on the Shawn Ryan Show, critics accused Figure of human-in-the-loop puppeteering rather than full autonomy. Adcock has publicly defended Figure’s autonomy claims while competitors continue to scrutinize the demos. Humanoids Daily.
Spotify Podcasts
