Who Is Brett Adcock? The Serial Founder Behind Figure

Figure AI is, by valuation, one of the most valuable robotics companies ever created — a humanoid startup reportedly worth around $39 billion with backers like Nvidia and Microsoft, a robot designed for your home, and its own factory churning out machines. And the person who willed all of that into existence in barely four years isn't a roboticist. He never built a robot before 2022. He's a farm kid from Illinois turned three-time founder named Brett Adcock — and his entire approach to Figure makes a lot more sense once you know the two companies he built first.

So let's do the obvious thing and get to know him: where he came from, why a recruiting-software guy and an air-taxi founder decided to bet everything on humanoids, and the audacious calls — dumping OpenAI, building his own robot brain, starting a second company on the side — that define the way he runs Figure.

First, the short answer: who is the CEO of Figure?

Figure's CEO is Brett Adcock, who founded the company in 2022 and still runs it day to day. The important thing to understand up front is what he is not: he isn't a robotics PhD or a lab veteran like Boston Dynamics' Robert Playter, and he isn't an engineer-founder who built the core technology himself like Unitree's Wang Xingxing. Adcock is a repeat entrepreneur — a builder of companies — and Figure is the third hard, capital-intensive industry he has charged into as an outsider. We placed him among his rivals in who runs the humanoid robot companies.

Two companies before robots: Vettery and Archer

Adcock grew up on a third-generation family farm in central Illinois and started tinkering with small software businesses as a teenager. His first real hit was Vettery, a machine-learning recruiting marketplace he founded in 2012 with longtime collaborator Adam Goldstein. They scaled it to a network of tens of thousands of companies and sold it to The Adecco Group for $110 million in 2018.

Then he did something founders rarely do: he jumped straight from software into one of the hardest hardware problems on Earth. In 2018 he co-founded Archer Aviation, an electric vertical-takeoff "air taxi" (eVTOL) company, again with Goldstein. Archer raised around a billion dollars, struck a major commercial deal with United Airlines, and went public in 2021. Building certified electric aircraft taught Adcock how to raise enormous sums, recruit elite hardware engineers, and operate in a field where the physics is unforgiving — exactly the muscles a humanoid company needs.

Adcock's pattern is unmistakable: pick an industry everyone considers impossibly hard, walk in as a total outsider, raise more money than seems reasonable, hire people far more technical than himself, and move faster than the incumbents think is safe. Figure is that pattern aimed at humanoids.

Why he started Figure (2022)

Adcock founded Figure AI in 2022 on a simple, enormous thesis: that a general-purpose humanoid robot is one of the largest markets that could ever exist, because human labor is, and the world is short of workers. Lacking a robotics background himself, he did what he'd done at Archer — he bought the expertise. Figure quickly filled up with senior engineers poached from Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Google DeepMind, Apple and the best robotics labs, giving a brand-new company an unusually experienced bench almost overnight.

The robots came fast. Figure 01 walked, Figure 02 went to work, and the latest Figure 03 is explicitly designed for the home — softer materials, wireless charging, a better voice system. You can see how quickly the hardware advanced in how Figure's robots evolved and the Figure 03 demo.

The boldest call: dumping OpenAI for Helix

In its early days Figure partnered with OpenAI to give its robots language and reasoning — a headline-grabbing alliance. Then, in February 2025, Adcock made the boldest move of his career so far: he ended the OpenAI collaboration, declaring that "Figure's AI models are built entirely in-house" and that you can't solve embodied AI at scale unless you own the whole stack.

What he replaced it with is Helix, Figure's own vision-language-action model — a single end-to-end brain that lets a robot see, understand a spoken request and act, instead of following hand-coded routines. The Helix 02 release in January 2026 pushed that further, with full-body autonomous control in environments the robot has never seen before. The bet that whoever owns the robot's brain wins is the through-line of our piece on Helix, Carbon and GR00T — the AI brains behind the humanoid race.

From demo to factory: BotQ and real deployments

Plenty of founders can stage a slick demo. Adcock's harder bet is manufacturing. Figure delivered its first robots to a commercial client at the end of 2024 and put them to work on a BMW production line in Spartanburg, South Carolina — one of the first humanoids doing scheduled shifts in a real factory.

To make many of them, Figure built BotQ, a high-volume factory targeting around 12,000 robots per year from its first line. By 2026 the company said it had delivered 350+ of its Figure 03 units and pushed its build rate from one robot a day to roughly one an hour. Whether that output translates into robots that can actually hold down a job — not just walk a demo — is exactly the question we set out in how you actually test a humanoid robot.

The money: a $39 billion bet

Few founders raise like Adcock. After a 2024 round that valued Figure at roughly $2.6 billion (with backers including Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel and Jeff Bezos), Figure announced a Series C in September 2025 that raised over $1 billion and reportedly valued the company at about $39 billion — led by Parkway Venture Capital with Brookfield, Nvidia and Intel Capital. That vaulted Figure into the ranks of the most valuable robotics companies on the planet, on the strength of a product line that is still mostly pre-deployment.

Meanwhile, a second bet: Hark

Here's the detail that tells you the most about Brett Adcock. In late 2025, while running a $39-billion humanoid company, he started another one. Hark is a separate AI lab he reportedly seeded with $100 million of his own money, aimed at building a "universal" agentic AI interface for personal devices. It shares a campus with Figure, has hired ex-Apple designers and AI researchers, and Adcock remains Figure's CEO throughout. Read it as either remarkable ambition or dangerously divided attention — but it is pure Adcock.

What Brett Adcock gets right (and the risk)

Strip away the headline numbers and the case for Adcock — and the worry about him — both come into focus:

• Outsider's speed. Not being a roboticist frees him from "how it's always been done." Figure iterates and ships at a pace traditional robotics labs rarely match.
• Vertical integration. Owning the brain (Helix), the hardware and now the factory (BotQ) is a deliberate copy of the most successful hardware companies — and the reason he walked away from OpenAI.
• A talent magnet and a fundraising machine. He hires people far more technical than himself and raises money at a scale that buys years of runway.
• The risk: hype outrunning deployment. Figure is valued like a winner before most of its robots have proven they can do real, sustained work — the same gap we keep flagging in Atlas vs Optimus. And splitting his focus across Figure and Hark is a bet that he can run two frontier companies at once.

Whether Figure becomes the defining humanoid company or an over-valued cautionary tale, the through-line is one outsider's conviction, executed at speed and funded to the hilt. In an industry full of engineer-founders, Brett Adcock is something rarer: a serial entrepreneur who treats "build a humanoid" as just the next impossible company to build. That's worth understanding.

The quick facts on Brett Adcock

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