Brett Adcock
Brett Adcock is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Figure AI, a humanoid robotics company he established in 2022. He previously co-founded Archer Aviation, an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft company that went public via a SPAC merger in 2021, before stepping down to focus on Figure AI. Adcock is best known for pursuing a general-purpose humanoid robot platform — the Figure 02 — designed for industrial labor automation, with deployments at BMW manufacturing facilities and a company valuation reaching $39 billion following a 2025 Series C round.
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“"We launched the marketplace at Vetteri and it just like completely took off. And then a year later we sold for 110 million."”
Source→“"I think the AI work that we're seeing here now is going to be so much. It's going to be like 100 times bigger than the internet. It's just like everything is just so, it's just working so well. Like the system is working well. Like deep learning works. And everything's happening faster than I would think."”
Source→“"Only one in a thousand websites have APIs. So in most, you know, most computer use globally is on the internet and browser... It was in our post training, right? Like it was in our, we have a reinforcement learning process that we think is maybe nobody else in the world has done."”
Source→“"I found a way to do everything very cheaply in silicon and chips. And reduce the price by like 90%, make it much more scalable, make it work better... the fabrication times for designing our own chips and getting them out took about a year... We had a special fabricator in Europe that had to go make them."”
Source→“"The hard problem is not that... the most important constraint to really solve is like building a really intelligent robot system... There's a bunch of robots you can go buy now. You can buy some from China and you get them and they're complete crap. They can't do anything."”
Source→“"There's probably like a rough back of the envelope is probably like 20 to 30 people in California know how to build really good AI models... I gave him like a really good package... 15, $20 million of stock... And he got an offer for, to go to Meta for 36 million of four years..."”
Source→“"I had to fund figure with stock from Archer cause I had no other cash. Stock was coming down. The stock was just like literally like a falling knife. Well, at that point, it was just like, you know, I think it went from like 10 bucks to like two."”
Source→“The $700 million Series A for Figure founder Brett Adcock's new AI neolab Hark shows the new state of play — with Nvidia, AMD Ventures, ARK, Brookfield, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures all participating.”
Source→“"Here's Brett Adcock sharing what they're doing at Figure. They had an eight hour challenge to have this robot they're building sort packages. And they did it for 200 hours. That's today. This is the least good it will ever be."”
Source→“running the first documented 8-hour fully autonomous commercial shift”
Source→“If we had the right data we could snap our fingers I think general robotics would be solved today. I think we'd be able to do most things a human can in the world... right now our biggest constraint is data.”
Source→“We just launched a new cluster of B200s that we announced a few weeks back that just went live this month. We're training in the pre-training some of the largest models we've ever done.”
Source→“We're working 80-100 hour weeks here. Just like how do we go solve for a general purpose machine — that's what we're pushing now.”
Source→“We have an industrial design team here internally run by David... We want to create something that is really delightful to be around. And it's not just like the way the robot looks or the size of it. It's how it walks and interacts and how it's body language and how the human machine interaction is.”
Source→“What is the same thing for humanoids? What are the same humanoids to be able to do like dishes and laundry, but also do some like package logistics and healthcare and their stuff.”
Source→“About a year ago, we made a strong pivot away from code into neural networks... I think the team has probably shown like, I think some of the best neural networks for control in the world on humanoids.”
Source→“My company before this designed like flying robots at Archer and it's got the same properties... It's a robot. And Archer's aircrafts are like highly overactuated.”
Source→“Brett Adcock — CEO and founder of Figure AI. Serial entrepreneur (previously founded Archer Aviation, took it public).”
Source→“Moritz, can you show her what would happen if we lost like a left knee?... This is kudos to the controls team. I think we have like one of the best controls team in the world.”
Source→“We're building really awesome, magical AI models. And we're building really magical hardware.”
Source→“In my mind, this is not a manufacturing problem. This is an intelligence problem.”
Source→“I own the IP from NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. I spun it out two years ago and I'm funding this project... we will deploy hopefully to our first schools in beta by end of year.”
Source→“We just want humanoid robots to work, they're working now & it's pretty simple.. we're seeing robots do everyday things like clean up a living room, do commercial work.”
“We're now in a good spot to certify the aircraft and enter like federal airspace.”
Source→“Right now we interact with AI through like 20 year old computers, like phones and MacBooks and stuff like that. And they're just not the ideal intermediary and interface to AI.”
Source→“There's a technology that was designed at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab about a decade ago that can detect weapons underneath clothes and in backpacks and bags from like 10, 20 meters away.”
Source→“We had a small batch of robots that went out to BMW last year and did work every day. We ran for six months every single day... We refactored our whole approach to how to commercialize the software and AI systems after that. And that kind of led us to Helix 2.”
Source→“Jeff Bezos, which is a big investor for us at Figure. I get to basically have access to and talk with.”
Source→“I don't think there's any group in the world that I wouldn't think on the robotic side that makes the designs more parts than we do on the robot. We design the motors, basically every part within there, the rotor, stator, everything. The sensors, the structure, the kinematics, the joints, the batteries... That has really enabled us to control our destiny.”
Source→“The meta problem in robotics is to be able to solve a humanoid robot. If you can solve this, it'll build the biggest business in the world by a large factor. A little under half the world's GDP is human labor.”
Source→“Molly O'Shea participated as a participant in the Sourcery Newsletter podcast featuring Brett Adcock.”
“In my mind, this is not a manufacturing problem. This is an intelligence problem.”
“This logic also explains why Figure ended its OpenAI collaboration. Sharing visibility into its robotics intelligence with a partner that was simultaneously developing interest in the space was an untenable position.”
“The BMW pilot — a small batch of Figure robots deployed and running every day for six months — is the clearest proof point. The learnings from that deployment directly produced Figure's next-generation AI model, Helix 2.”
AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.