Name: AI startup raises $70M for humanoid robot
Uploaded: 2023-05-25T05:17:17.318Z
Duration: 5 min 12 s
Description: Figure CEO and Founder Brett Adcock joins Bloomberg to discuss how the AI robotics startup raised $70 million to help with its development of a humanoid robot that could take on a wide range of tasks traditionally performed by people.

Figure CEO and Founder Brett Adcock joins Bloomberg to discuss how the AI robotics startup raised $70 million to help with its development of a humanoid robot that could take on a wide range of tasks traditionally performed by people.

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AI startup raises $70M for humanoid robot

When you think about where figure could really support the workforce can you give us a little bit of color on which industries you think have the most potential to bring in your first iteration of the figure one robot. Yeah. Well thanks for having me on today. I think from like a very long term perspective we're building human ways to do any type of physical labor that humans do today. And our go to market plan is to get into revenues of the business as fast as possible. Those early applications for us have been in areas such as manufacturing retail and warehousing. We're working on that and we're spending considerable amount of time in warehouses today. So we hope over the next several years we can see early applications of our robots doing physical labor work in a warehouse such as picking items unloading trucks restocking shelves depolitizing. And ultimately we hope that humanoids can play a very big role in helping to fill this physical labor like void that we're seeing in the economy today. And there's almost 11 million unfilled jobs in the US. You hope that our solution here long term can help really make an impact. Brett what you describe sounds similar to how machines or robots currently sort and retrieve inventory inside Amazon's gigantic warehouses. How will you improve and refine that. Yeah I think you walk into a warehouse today or even like most most like you know companies everything that could be automated is mostly automated today with just you know great robotic solutions overall. And there's a tremendous amount of work that's being done by humans that are kind of more complicated that need extra degrees of freedom. They need to interact with some type of some sort of shelf that's hard for a robot to do or at least a single purpose robot to do. And we we believe strongly that you know humans build this world around ourselves to interact with a human form. And so almost it's like universal general interface as a human body. If we can build a robot that can interact with that physical world similar to humans we can come in and do human type work day one. So that means walking into a warehouse where you know Amazon or a bunch of these bigger groups out there have hundreds of thousands of employees that are turning over 100 percent per year. They're having it's really hard work. They're walking 10 miles a day picking 50 items an hour. You know that can be really hot and cold conditions. And there's basically a giant labor shortage happening here across that. And we hope that we can basically go in and start doing those applications without basic minimal interaction or minimal changes to the environment. Right. When I think about kind of the area that your fresh cash is going to find you've also got folks like sanctuary I 1 X Tesla's optimist Google. A lot of names are pushing into kind of this humanoid robot space. I would figure getting into a factory or a warehouse those kind of clients don't want to change over from one tech to another. I'm sure the race is on. How are you looking to beat out that kind of big also well-funded competition. Yeah the space is certainly getting really heating up which is I think really positive overall. The ultimate goal for us is to do useful work. We need to basically walk in and see a robot doing boring useful things all day long. And that's like the ultimate goal that we set out to in the near term is can we design a robot and can we test it. So in our lab here we have a full warehouse built in the end. We're starting to have a conversations with some of the bigger warehousing groups worldwide. And our goal is ultimately to prove that out. So we're spending a lot of this capital today on just overall robot development and manufacturing. We're building out an end to end data engine so that our robots can get into the market and just data to help train our neural nets. And then we're spending a lot of time on the commercial side like what are the right you know first applications for us. And then ultimately how do we scale the robot. Many applications over time. Sure. One of the big criticisms or concerns about building more robots is they will take human jobs. And I know you've addressed how we have a giant labor shortage. And so this is designed to help solve for that. But I wonder as you look at what the prospects for your humanoid robots are what kind of new jobs can be created because you have these humanoid robots. What do you foresee happening down the road. I mean you have an ability to basically scale into almost infinite amount of production. And it's going to be really incredible as we think about what this can do to GDP what this can do to ultimately the economy when there's no like per capita constraints like ultimately humanoid should be able to do any physical thing a human can. So if we have like infinite ability to scale humanoids like what does that really do to the economy. It's quite hard to fathom. We hope that we fill this area in the labor market which is we've seen tremendous amount of job shortages. We hope over time there's a consumer aspect of putting a humanoid in a home helping care for the elderly. And we think there's a big market opportunity for space over time and that human rights can help colonize planets. So we think over time there's a wide range of applications even like existing ones and also new we can deploy into I think to build what may be one of the biggest businesses ever built.

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