A Sunnyvale-based robotics startup hit what its CEO called a "big milestone" on Thursday with an eye-popping Series B round that was backed by major investors including the OpenAI Startup Fund, Nvidia, Microsoft and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Figure AI announced that it had raised $675 million in the new round which also valued the company at $2.6 billion. Other investors that participated in the Series B round include Parkway Venture Capital, Intel Capital, Align Ventures, and ARK Invest.
"Big milestone for us. Excited to be working with the best team of my career and working to ship robots. congrats Figure team," founder and CEO Brett Adcock wrote on LinkedIn.
It brings the company's total funding to $845 million, which includes $70 million from a Series A round and $100 million which Adcock supplied to bootstrap the company's initial operations when he founded the company.
The company is developing a humanoid robot that can autonomously perform manual tasks. Its first robot, dubbed Figure 01, weighs 130 pounds and stands 5'6" tall.
Last month, Figure also announced that it signed a deal with BMW to explore potential use cases for its robots in BMW's factories.
“Our vision at Figure is to bring humanoid robots into commercial operations as soon as possible. This investment, combined with our partnership with OpenAI and Microsoft, ensures that we are well-prepared to bring embodied AI into the world to make a transformative impact on humanity," Adcock said in a statement.
The company also announced on Thursday that it "entered into a collaboration agreement" with OpenAI to develop artificial intelligence models for humanoid robotics. And it will use Microsoft Azure to handle AI-related needs such as managing infrastructure, training and storage.
OpenAI has been developing software with robots in mind since its early days.
In 2016, OpenAI launched a public beta developer toolkit called Gym which supported robot simulations. And the following year it released open-source robot simulation software called Roboschool.
Amazon has long deployed robots across its massive network of warehouses, albeit not in humanoid form. Last year, the ecommerce giant tested a humanoid robot in some of its U.S. warehouses, the BBC reported.
Other companies developing humanoid robots include Tesla, Anybots, Apptronik and 1X, a Norwegian company formerly known as Halodi Robotics.
