On February 29, 2024, the humanoid-robot startup Figure announced it had raised $675 million in Series B funding at a $2.6 billion valuation, with investors including Microsoft, the OpenAI Startup Fund, NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos (via Bezos Expeditions), Parkway Venture Capital, Intel Capital, Align Ventures, and ARK Invest. Alongside the raise, Figure and OpenAI signed a collaboration agreement to “develop next generation AI models for humanoid robots,” combining OpenAI’s research with Figure’s robotics hardware and software.
In the announcement, OpenAI’s Peter Welinder said, “We see a path with Figure to explore what humanoid robots can achieve when powered by highly capable multimodal models.” Figure also said it would use Microsoft Azure for AI infrastructure and named a first commercial agreement with BMW Manufacturing to bring humanoids into automotive production.
The deal captured the 2024 surge of money and attention into general-purpose humanoid robots, with frontier AI labs supplying the “brains” and robotics companies supplying the bodies. The Figure-OpenAI partnership was later dissolved, but the announcement remains a marker of the moment large language model labs and humanoid robotics began to converge.