Author: Zen, PANews
Figure AI, a humanoid robotics company, recently launched a "Human vs. Robot" parcel sorting challenge, attracting global attention. This narrow victory for humans has been summarized by many as "humans have won now, but lost in the future." This statement is not unfounded; before the competition even began, Figure had already started live-streaming the robot sorting process, and has been doing so for seven consecutive days. In terms of tireless and continuous work capacity, robots far surpass humans.
The live stream of this sorting competition, along with the previously released high-profile promotional video for its home robot, has earned Figure a reputation for being a show-off. However, there's no doubt that Figure AI is becoming one of the most watched humanoid robot companies in Silicon Valley. This company, founded just three years ago, has seen its valuation soar to $39 billion after its latest round of funding, with investors including top companies and capital firms such as NVIDIA, Intel Capital, Salesforce, LG, and Qualcomm.
Behind this company is Brett Adcock, a serial entrepreneur who rose from humble beginnings on a farm. Before founding Figure, he had two very different entrepreneurial experiences: first, he built the recruitment platform Vettery, which he sold to Adecco Group for $110 million in 2018; then he co-founded Archer Aviation, an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft company, and helped it list on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021.
Brett Adcock is not a founder who has long been deeply involved in one industry; instead, he constantly ventures into more complex, capital-intensive, and difficult-to-verify fields. Figure is his most high-profile bet to date, which has propelled him to the center of the AI robotics craze.
Surrounding this company are grand visions about a general-purpose robotic workforce, as well as concerns about its overvaluation, premature commercialization, safety risks, and technological roadmap. To understand Figure, one must first understand how its founder got to where he is today.
Serial entrepreneurs who started out of corn and soybean farms
Brett Adcock was born in 1986 on a corn and soybean farm in central Illinois. Growing up in a family that had farmed for generations instilled in Adcock a strong sense of "how to create value for the world from nothing." He started his own internet company at the age of 16, and by the time he graduated first in his class from high school, his family knew that he should perhaps leave the farm and enter the world of entrepreneurship and business.
During his university years, Adcock continued to independently develop various software products, including an early website selling outdoor electronics. He then focused his efforts on the job search and recruitment sector, developing "Street of Walls," a content website to help job seekers prepare for interviews in fields such as finance; "Working App," a mobile job search website; and a video interview website. These projects were not successful, resembling more of early, immature entrepreneurial experiments.
In 2012, Adcock, who was working in New York, turned his attention back to the recruitment market. He co-founded Vettery with Adam Goldstein. Initially, Vettery was a platform for third-party recruitment companies, but this model quickly proved uncompetitive. After several adjustments, Adcock and his team decided to change direction, placing job seekers and companies directly on the same platform and improving matching efficiency through software and machine learning.
After Vettery launched its platform, growth accelerated. Adcock later recalled that the platform's user base doubled for several consecutive weeks. By 2017, Vettery had grown to 300 employees, approximately 20,000 clients, and conducted about 30,000 interviews per month through the system. The company also attracted the attention of Adecco Group, the world's largest recruitment firm, and was acquired by the latter in 2018 for $110 million.
This deal also brought Adcock, who was just over 30, a considerable personal fortune. He began to seek out more complex, longer-term, and capital- and engineering-intensive problems, working in hardware and sustainability. So he moved west to California, to Silicon Valley, in search of his next opportunity.
In three years, we will transform the flying car startup into a listed company.
As he sought to solve more intractable problems, Adcock could no longer afford to throw out ideas and experiment at low cost as he had in college. After much consideration, he chose to focus on solving transportation problems in three-dimensional airspace. Adcock wanted to try building flying cars like those in science fiction movies, so electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft became the most suitable choice.
In 2018, Adcock and Adam Goldstein reunited to found Archer Aviation. Compared to Vettery, Archer is a completely different world. It requires a top-tier engineering team, hardware development, supply chain, engineering and manufacturing, aviation certification, public safety, and long-term patience from the capital markets.
The founding of Archer Aviation was also a serendipitous stroke of luck. At the time, French aviation giant Airbus was transferring all of its flying car "Vahana" operations to France; and Kitty Hawk's cost-cutting efforts in collaboration with Boeing (Kitty Hawk was later dissolved in 2022) had caused discontent among some members of its engineering team. Adcock seized the opportunity, recruiting a large number of people from both projects and quickly building a seasoned team.
In 2021, Adcock and his team successfully completed the maiden flight of the Maker aircraft's full-size two-seat autonomous prototype. They also partnered with automotive giant Fiat Chrysler on supply chain, advanced composite materials, and engineering, design, and production, and secured a $1 billion contract from United Airlines. That same year, Archer Aviation went public on the New York Stock Exchange through a SPAC, valuing the company at approximately $2.7 billion. Today, the company has a market capitalization of $4.5 billion and is part of the portfolio of Adcock's Ark Fund.
Despite its late entry into the market, Archer Aviation's rapid rise has made it a major competitor in the emerging eVTOL industry. In November 2022, Archer unveiled its five-seat "Midnight" aircraft, which, once granted type certification by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), will become the company's first air taxi product.
However, Adcock quietly left shortly after the company went public. In April 2022, Archer announced that Adam Goldstein would become the sole CEO, and Adcock would no longer serve as co-CEO, but would remain on the board of directors. The company explained at the time that this move was to simplify the operational structure and facilitate flight testing, certification, and commercialization.
The real reasons for his departure are likely more complex and unknown to outsiders. Looking at the company's stock performance, it was indeed in a post-IPO slump at the time. Adcock later stated that he left Archer due to "disagreements" with the board, particularly after the company went public, where his goals differed from those of the team.
Perhaps for him, corporate governance, regulatory pathways, and commercialization pace are no longer suitable for a founder who always wants to jump to the next technological revolution.
The End of Entrepreneurship? Adcock Plans to Build Figure with a 30-Year Perspective
After leaving Archer, Adcock quickly moved on to the next equally futuristic, and currently even bigger, gamble. In 2022, he founded Figure AI, entering the field of general-purpose humanoid robots. In Figure's Master Plan, he wrote that his goal was to build the company with a 30-year perspective, investing time and resources in "maximizing the utility impact on humanity."
In terms of personnel, Adcock adopted a similar strategy to that used when he founded Archer. He quickly assembled a team of 60 people, whose members mostly came from well-known companies and projects such as Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Apple's self-driving car project, and Google's DeepMind.
Giving AI a body is the challenge Adcock set for Figure. Figure isn't going to be an industrial robotic arm or a service robot, but rather a general-purpose humanoid robot capable of entering human environments, using human tools, and performing a variety of tasks. Adcock believes the world was originally designed for the human body, and if robots can be created to interact with the world in a similar way, a large amount of work can be automated.
At the heart of this philosophy lies Adcock's assessment of the labor market. In Figure's Master Plan, he wrote that the U.S. has over 10 million "insecure or undesirable" jobs, and an aging population will further complicate the task of expanding the workforce for businesses; if the economy is to continue growing, it needs more productivity, which in turn requires more automation. Figure thus identifies manufacturing, logistics, warehousing, retail, and home environments as long-term directions.
As Figure's valuation rises, Adcock faces increasingly concentrated criticism. The first type of criticism stems from the significant gap between commercialization and valuation. Essentially, the market is buying into a distant future expectation. While Figure is attracting market attention with a valuation approaching $40 billion, its revenue scale and mass production capacity remain limited, and its future revenue projections heavily depend on its ability to deploy a large number of robots before 2029.
Furthermore, Figure's breakup with OpenAI has also garnered significant attention and controversy. In 2024, Figure collaborated with OpenAI to develop next-generation robot AI models, receiving investment support from OpenAI, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, and others. However, less than a year later, Adcock decided to terminate the collaboration and instead develop the models internally.
According to Business Insider, Adcock later stated that OpenAI brought little value to Figure beyond branding, and that robotic AI requires a different technological approach than chatbots. He also claimed that he believed the collaboration was over when OpenAI expressed its intention to develop humanoid robots. The report also mentioned that an OpenAI engineer retweeted the relevant clip and stated that the claims were "untrue."
"Favoring" is a more difficult problem and a larger narrative.
Looking back at Adcock's three main entrepreneurial journeys, Vettery, Archer, and Figure appear unrelated on the surface—one a recruitment platform, another a flying car, and a third a humanoid robot. However, they actually share the same entrepreneurial philosophy: choosing a huge, inefficient market where a technological inflection point is emerging, and simultaneously advancing with capital, engineering teams, and a radical narrative.
At Vettery, he bet that machine learning could improve the efficiency of job matching; at Archer, he bet that batteries, motors, and aerospace engineering could open up urban air mobility; at Figure, he bet that AI models, robotic hardware, and manufacturing capabilities could merge into a new type of workforce. Adcock's way of thinking is not to start with a single product, but to work backward from "how the future world should work" to determine what companies should be started now.
Brett Adcock's career path resembles a curve of ever-increasing asset burdens: from software platforms to aircraft, and then to humanoid robots. He is not the kind of technical expert who has been deeply involved in a single field for decades; he is more like a "startup hunter," sniffing out opportunities, organizing resources, recruiting teams, amplifying the narrative, and then moving on.
Now standing in the spotlight of Figure AI, he faces both skepticism and applause. But regardless of the outcome, he has already etched his name into the first chapter of AI robot business history.
