The strongest robot on the surface has arrived.

Flexible fingers, flipping wrists to grasp objects, voice interaction, entering the factory to work... In every move, the robot has taken a step closer to humans.

This is the latest robot called "Figure 02" released by the hottest robot manufacturer Figure AI this year.

In terms of appearance, Figure 02 is about the same height as an adult male, about 170cm tall and weighs 70 kilograms, designed specifically to work in a human environment. The appearance is also more perfect than the previous generation. The exoskeleton structure, with the outer skin bearing the load and pressure, the power supply, computing power wiring of the robot are no longer exposed, but integrated inside, which not only makes the robot's packaging more compact but also more beautiful.

The highlight is undoubtedly the "intelligence" of Figure 02. With a total of six high-performance RGB cameras on the head and front and back of the body, coupled with an AI-driven visual system, the robot has a strong visual reasoning ability and can also interact with voice. The large model used by Figure AI is the world's strongest player Open AI, which has improved the computing and reasoning ability of Figure 02 by three times compared to Figure 01.

In terms of application, the last time it amazed the audience was Figure 01 spent 10 hours learning to make coffee, and this time the new version has entered the factory to work: it is being tested in BMW's assembly plant, and can perform precision tasks such as inserting sheet metal parts into specific devices. The endurance of the new version has also increased by 50%, and it can work continuously for more than 20 hours.

Advertisement

After the release of the new version, Brett Adcock, the founder and CEO of Figure AI, also posted a tweet, calling it the "strongest" humanoid robot on the surface. He revealed that the design review of Figure 02 took a total of 18 months.

Looking at it from the long river of history, robots are updating and replacing at the speed of a tornado. The robot science fiction world we are looking forward to is gradually becoming a reality.

16.86 billion, Bezos, OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft and other half of Silicon Valley have all invested

The development of Figure AI is like taking off like a rocket. Figure AI is a startup company established in 2022, headquartered in Silicon Valley. In March 2023, it launched its first product Figure 01, claiming to be the world's first commercial humanoid robot, and launched Figure 02 again a year later.This is not unrelated to the founder's sophisticated entrepreneurial experience. It is reported that Brett Adcock has shown a strong interest in technology and business acumen since childhood. During his middle and college years, Adcock had already started his own entrepreneurial attempts, mainly focusing on content creation in the technology field. So far, he has 20 years of experience in technology entrepreneurship. He was the founder of the electric aircraft startup Archer and the online recruitment platform Vettery. One of these companies has gone public, and the other has achieved a $100 million exit through acquisition.

Figure AI is quite eye-catching in the race. First, the luxury founding team mainly comes from "national team" platforms such as IHMC (Institute for Human and Machine Cognition), Boston Dynamics, and Stanford University, which have already made great achievements in the field of humanoid robots. There are also AI robot experts from top technology companies such as Tesla and Google DeepMind.

On the other hand, unlike some who want to build high-end, laboratory robots, Figure AI chose to go the route of general-purpose humanoid robots and embodied intelligence technology from the beginning. The first step to achieve this is to incorporate humanoid robots into the workforce, replacing tedious human work in scenarios such as warehouse management, logistics distribution, and healthcare. The ultimate goal of Figure AI is to create a commercially viable humanoid robot. At present, the pace of Figure AI is very fast, and it has made pioneering progress in just two years.

Rapid development is inseparable from the support of capital. This startup, which has only been established for two years, has raised a total of $750 million in financing, and almost half of Silicon Valley has competed to follow the investment, which is enough to see how popular Figure AI is and how much expectation it is placed on.

In April 2023, Figure AI completed its first round of financing, obtaining $70 million in Series A financing from 10 investors including Aliya Capital Partners. This fund provided important support for the company's early development and accelerated the development and manufacturing process of its first autonomous humanoid robot, Figure 01. Then, it ended a small amount of financing before the Series B round: in July 2023, Figure AI received a $9 million investment from Big Sky Partners and Intel Capital.

The latest round of financing took place in February of this year, Series B, with an amount of about $675 million (nearly 5 billion yuan), and the investors behind it are all big names, which can be called the "investment dream team." Bezos promised to invest $100 million through his investment company Explore Investments LLC, Microsoft invested $95 million, Nvidia and an Amazon-owned fund will each invest $50 million, Intel's venture capital institution will invest $25 million, OpenAI will invest $5 million, and "Wood Sister" Catherine Wood's venture capital fund ARK Venture Fund will invest $2.5 million.

In addition, there are also technology giants such as Samsung and LG, as well as many venture capital companies and individuals participating in the investment. This round of financing has raised the company's valuation to $2.6 billion (about 18.6 billion yuan).

The world is as hot as this

In recent years, how hot humanoid robots are can be seen from the direction of money.

In the overall relatively sluggish primary market, humanoid robots are undoubtedly the hottest track, and technology companies are investing in the AI field at an astonishing speed. The latest data from Crunchbase shows that in the first half of 2024 alone, more than $35.5 billion worldwide flowed to AI startups. Among them, in the six rounds of venture capital raised over $1 billion, five rounds were raised by AI companies, and other AI startups also raised more than $100 million in a single round.The world is ablaze with this fervor. Abroad, in addition to Figure AI, in January 2024, the Norwegian humanoid robot startup 1X Technologies also completed a Series B financing round of 100 million US dollars, with participation from Swedish venture capital fund EQT Ventures and Samsung NEXT, among other institutions; in February, it also received nearly 6 million US dollars in strategic investment from Zhongjian Technology and Zhaoxin Shares, and established a joint venture in Mainland China.

Domestic players have also emerged with a lot of capital attention.

Not long ago in June, we were inundated with news of the largest angel round of financing this year: Galaxy Universal Robots raised 700 million yuan in angel round. The investor lineup included 18 parties, including Meituan Dianping Strategic Investment, BAIC Industry Investment, Sensetime Guoxiang Fund, iFlytek Fund, and other strategic and industrial investors; Qiming Venture Capital, BlueRun Ventures, Matrix Partners, Source Code Capital, IDG Capital, and other top financial institutions, and also included top 985 university capital, including the "Tsinghua" SEE Fund of the Infinite Fund, and the "Peking University" Yanyuan Venture Capital.

Wang He, the leader of the research and development team of Galaxy Universal Robots, is one of the earliest frontier scholars in China to conduct embodied intelligence research, a doctoral supervisor at Peking University, and has obtained a doctoral degree from Stanford University, under the guidance of the American Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine academician and artificial intelligence master Leonidas J. Guibas, and he also serves as the director of the Embodied Intelligence Center of the Zhiyuan Research Institute. Co-founder Yao Tengzhou graduated from the Robotics Institute of Beihang University, under the guidance of the robot industry master and the dean of Zhongguancun Zhiyu Research Institute, Professor Wang Tianmiao, and has served in the ABB Robotics Research and Development Center, accumulating many years of experience in the development of industrial and service robots.

The track also saw the hottest entrepreneurial star, "post-90s" technology blogger and former Huawei "genius boy" Peng Zhihui, who founded Zhiyuan Robotics. In March 2023, the company was quickly pursued by capital, and its valuation reached 7 billion within a year of establishment, with four "plus" added to the A round of financing within a year.

Zhiyuan Robotics attracted top institutions including Gaoling Venture Capital, Qiji Chuangtan, Gaorong Capital, BlueRun Ventures, BYD, BV Baidu Venture Capital, C Capital, SAIC Capital, Zhongke Innovation, Dinghui Investment, and Lingang New Area Fund in six rounds of financing. According to media reports at the end of June, recently, Zhiyuan Robotics is about to start a new round of financing, and it is said that some old shareholders will participate in this financing again.

In February 2024, Yushu Technology also announced the completion of nearly 1 billion yuan in Series B2 financing, with investors including Meituan, Jinshi Investment, and Source Code Capital. Yushu Technology started with the quadruped robot "robot dog" and officially entered the humanoid robot track by releasing the first humanoid robot H1 in August 2023.

Going further back, in July 2023, Data Robotics obtained more than 1 billion yuan in Series C financing, with Knowledge City Group, Shanghai Guosheng Investment Group, and Shui Mu Chunjin participating in the investment. Data Robotics was established in 2015, with main products including cloud intelligent robot development platforms and humanoid service cloud robots, widely used in hotels, schools, supermarkets, and other life scenes. Other players that have attracted attention include Xingdong Jiyuan Leju Robots, Zhiyuan Robots, Zhuji Power, and Youlu Robots.

Looking at the robots on the market, the foothold for making progress lies in key technologies such as servo motors, harmonic transmission, sensors, and breakthroughs in AI large model technology in terms of intelligence, which have given robots higher performance. Prudently looking, even as strong as Figure 02 is still only at the stage of automation in a certain small production link, and the vast sea of humanoid robots is not so easy to reach. The current industry's concern about the topic of "technological breakthrough or capital carnival" undoubtedly reflects the current industry's anxiety.

This is a high-risk, high-reward track. As Brett Adcock wrote, "Our company will need decades to develop, and it will need a champion team dedicated to this mission, billions of dollars in investment, and engineering innovation to make an impact on the mass market. We face high risks and very low chances of success. However, if we succeed, we have the potential to have a positive impact on humanity and build the largest company on Earth."