The robotics startup Figure announced on Thursday that it has raised $675 million in a funding round from investors, including Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com (AMZN.O), Nvidia (NVDA.O), Microsoft (MSFT.O), and others. The investment was valued at $2.6 billion.
Figure, a Sunnyvale, California-based company, also announced that it has partnered with OpenAI to create generative AI for its humanoid robots.
Companies have been investing millions of dollars to capitalize on the interest in artificial intelligence (AI) following OpenAI’s debut of ChatGPT.
The OpenAI Startup Fund, Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, Parkway Venture Capital, Intel Capital, Align Ventures, and ARK Invest are among the other businesses that have contributed to the Figure investment.
The CEO and founder of Figure, Brett Adcock, stated that the company will use the funds to increase employment, speed up production, and create extensive language models for robotics.
According to Adcock, the business will also shift its AI infrastructure and training to Microsoft Azure.
In order to create humanoid robots that can see, hear, and carry out physical tasks, Figure will particularly train its AI models on robotics action data that it has gathered. These models will be built on OpenAI’s most recent GPT models, according to Adcock.
“We’ve always planned to come back to robotics and we see a path with Figure to explore what humanoid robots can achieve when powered by highly capable multimodal models,” said Peter Welinder, vice president of product and partnerships at OpenAI.
Investor interest in humanoid robots has increased again as AI-powered software expands the possibilities for robot-human interaction and collaboration. Tesla launches a new tab As the electric carmaker unveiled its most recent humanoid, the Optimus Gen, in development, Chief Executive Elon Musk projected that there will be a billion humanoid robots on Earth by the 2040s.
When Bloomberg originally revealed last week that Figure was seeking money, it stated that Bezos had pledged $100 million through his company Explore Investments LLC, Microsoft was contributing $95 million, Nvidia and a fund connected to Amazon were contributing $50 million apiece.
Figure and BMW Manufacturing partnered last month so that Figure’s humanoid robots could be used at the American automaker’s factory.
In its first external round last year, Figure garnered $70 million from investors led by Parkway Venture Capital.