OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, Jeff Bezos funds $675 million in Figure humanoid robotics

Humanoid robotics company Figure has raised $675 million in series B funding from top tech companies including Microsoft, OpenAI, Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, and more. With this new investment, Figure’s valuation now increased to $2.6 billion.

Other well-known names, Aprkway Venture Capital, Intel Capital, Align Venture, and ARK Invest also part of the Series-B funding.

Figure says that the new funding will help it to expand operations and ramp up efforts for commercialization. The investment follows an agreement between BMW and Figure to make robots for manufacturing facilities.

OpenAI and Microsoft:

Both of these partners and AI leaders are on the top of this Series-B funding. Separately, Figure has announced a collaboration agreement with OpenAI to develop AI models for humanoid robots.

This agreement was speculated last month in a media report as these companies showed high interest in early talks with Figure. Parties involved said to combine their expertise in respective fields to manufacture new robots with high general intelligence.

OpenAI creates large language model (LLM) applications and its ChatGPT has become a popular example of success in the generative AI and natural language processing industry. So, it has a lot to offer in this collaboration, especially from the AI point of view.

Peter Welinder, VP of Product and Partnerships at OpenAI affirmed early talks with Figure for this investment and collab on the use of multimodal models in robots.

Microsoft on the other hand will provide Azure AI infrastructure for training and storage to Figure robotics.

The Washington-based tech company said, “Figure will have access to Microsoft’s AI infrastructure and services to support the deployment of humanoid robots”.

(source – Figure)