Brett Adcock founded Figure AI in 2022 after previously founding electric aviation company Archer Aviation and recruiting platform Vettery, bringing a track record of scaling capital-intensive hardware startups to humanoid robotics. As CEO, Adcock guided Figure through a fifteen-fold valuation step-up between its Series B and Series C rounds within under two years, one of the steepest funding trajectories in the robotics sector.
Adcock made the strategic decision to end Figure's earlier AI-model collaboration with OpenAI, opting instead to build the company's Helix vision-language-action model fully in-house - a bet that owning the full robotics AI stack matters more for a hardware company than relying on an outside model partner.