- Figure AI reached a $39 billion valuation in September 2025 after raising over $1.9 billion from Jeff Bezos, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Intel Capital.
- Brett Adcock previously founded Vettery, sold to Adecco for over $100 million, and Archer Aviation, taken public at a $2.7 billion valuation.
- Figure’s humanoid robots helped produce over 30,000 BMW X3s at the Spartanburg plant, clocking 1,250 operating hours and moving 90,000 components.
- Adcock launched HARK, a new AI lab funded with $100 million of his own capital, to build human-centric AI systems for digital and physical autonomy.
A $39 Billion Company That Deletes Its Own Code
In March 2026, Figure AI’s robots run on pure neural networks. The company deleted its last 109,504 lines of hand-engineered C++ code when it shipped Helix 02, an AI architecture that handles perception, movement, and reasoning entirely through learned models. No scripts. No hardcoded behaviors. Just a machine that watches, thinks, and acts.
Brett Adcock, 39, founded Figure AI in May 2022. Less than four years later, the Sunnyvale-based company is valued at $39 billion, employs talent poached from Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Google DeepMind, and Apple, and has its third-generation humanoid robot working on BMW assembly lines in two countries. TIME named him one of the 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2024. His net worth sits around $19 billion. And he is just getting started.
A Farm Kid in Illinois Who Built Websites Before He Could Drive
Adcock grew up on a third-generation family farm outside Moweaqua, Illinois — a town of fewer than 2,000 people, 180 miles south of Chicago. At 16, while most kids in his school were learning to operate combines, Adcock was building web companies. He launched an e-commerce site selling outdoor electronics and a content platform called Street of Walls.
He enrolled at the University of Florida in 2004 and graduated in 2008. College gave him a network, but his instincts were already entrepreneurial. The farm taught him work ethic. The internet taught him scale. He wanted both.
Vettery, Archer, and the $100 Million Exit That Was Just a Warm-Up
In 2012, Adcock founded Vettery, an online talent marketplace that matched job seekers with companies using algorithmic screening. He scaled it across 18 global markets before selling to staffing giant Adecco for over $100 million. It was a clean exit — and a proof of concept that Adcock could build, scale, and sell.
But he was already thinking bigger. In October 2018, he co-founded Archer Aviation, an electric vertical takeoff and landing company. He secured a research grant at the University of Florida, hired aerospace engineers, and moved the company to Palo Alto. Archer raised over $1 billion, signed a $1.5 billion deal with United Airlines, and went public on the New York Stock Exchange in February 2021 at a $2.7 billion valuation. Two companies. Two billion-dollar outcomes. Adcock was 35.
The Moment Humanoids Became Inevitable
By 2022, Adcock had watched the AI revolution accelerate from the sidelines. Large language models were exploding. Computer vision was catching up. And yet, the physical world remained stubbornly analog — warehouses still relied on human hands, factories still needed human eyes, and homes still required human labor for every mundane task.
”We’re building a new species here.” — Brett Adcock
He founded Figure AI in May 2022 with a thesis that most investors found absurd: build a general-purpose humanoid robot that could operate in any environment designed for humans. Not a robotic arm bolted to a factory floor. Not a wheeled platform with a screen for a face. A bipedal, dexterous, autonomous machine that walks, grabs, and reasons — in real time.
From First Prototype to 30,000 BMWs
Figure moved fast. The company assembled a team of 700 engineers, many from the most advanced robotics and AI labs on the planet. In February 2024, it closed a $675 million Series B led by investors including Jeff Bezos, Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI, valuing the company at $2.6 billion. Eighteen months later, the Series C pushed that number to $39 billion — a 15x jump that stunned even Silicon Valley veterans.
The BMW partnership became the company’s proving ground. Figure 02 spent ten months at BMW’s Spartanburg plant, working five days a week, ten hours per shift, retrieving and positioning sheet metal parts for welding. It moved over 90,000 components and contributed to the production of more than 30,000 BMW X3s. In February 2026, BMW expanded the program to its Leipzig plant in Germany — the first humanoid robot deployment in European automotive production.
Helix 02, Figure 03, and the End of Hand-Coded Robotics
Adcock ended Figure’s collaboration agreement with OpenAI in early 2025, announcing that Figure had achieved a breakthrough in fully end-to-end robot AI built entirely in-house. The result was Helix, a proprietary AI system that controls the entire perception-to-action loop on board and in real time.
”Show me a minute of a robot doing a task uncut, closed-loop, and real-time. You just haven’t seen that elsewhere.” — Brett Adcock
In October 2025, Figure unveiled its third-generation robot, Figure 03, with a redesigned sensory suite and hand system built specifically for Helix. By March 2026, Helix 02 introduced System 0 — a full-body controller trained on over 1,000 hours of human motion data through reinforcement learning. The era of hand-coded robotics at Figure is officially over. Every movement, every decision, every reaction flows through neural networks.
What Comes After the Factory Floor
Adcock’s ambitions extend well beyond manufacturing. He predicts that within ten years, every home will have a humanoid — a claim he makes with the calm certainty of someone who has already built and exited two billion-dollar companies. Figure aims to produce one robot every 30 minutes at its BotQ manufacturing facility in 2026, with a fleet-learning model where one robot masters a task and every unit in the network inherits the skill instantly.
”The home is single-digit years away from being a place where humanoid robots can do useful work.” — Brett Adcock
He also launched HARK, a new AI lab funded with $100 million of his personal capital, focused on building what he calls “human-centric” AI systems that think proactively and improve recursively. The long game is an omni-model — a single neural network that handles speech, reasoning, and physical action simultaneously. Adcock sees humanoid labor as a $50 trillion market opportunity, one that dwarfs every company he has built before. For a serial founder who has never once slowed down between ventures, that is precisely the point.
