Figure's First Full HQ Tour: From the Lab to the Factory Floor

Corporate Overview & Scale

• Figure AI headquarters is a "robot campus" in the Bay Area comprising four buildings housing approximately 250–300 employees, with a total company headcount of around 500.
• The workforce is predominantly engineering-focused, with active growth in manufacturing, supply chain, and business operations teams.
• The company is a "pure-play" humanoid robot manufacturer, aiming to build a single general-purpose hardware platform capable of performing tasks across home, manufacturing, healthcare, and logistics.

Robotics Technology: Figure 3 & Helix AI

• The current flagship, Figure 3, runs on an onboard AI policy called Helix, a vision-language-action model that runs entirely locally on the robot's GPU without requiring constant internet connectivity.
• Helix processes visual data and outputs joint commands at 50–200 times per second to control approximately 40 motors (joints) with 360-degree range of motion.
• The control stack utilizes Reinforcement Learning (RL) trained in simulation (SIEM) to achieve high "sim-to-real" transfer, allowing the robot to handle unforeseen physical perturbations.
• Vulcan Initiative: An internal project enables the robot to maintain balance and operate even after losing communication or power to a major limb (e.g., a knee), allowing it to "hobble" or complete tasks despite hardware failure.
• Battery & Charging: Figure 3 features a 2.25 kWh battery housed in the torso; robots charge wirelessly through their feet at 2 kW, allowing a full charge in roughly one hour for 4–5 hours of operation.
• Durability: The robot can perform high-intensity movements like burpees (getting down and up from the ground) and has a "Never Fall" initiative to minimize and recover from falls.

Manufacturing & Supply Chain (Baku)

• The company manufactures robots internally at a facility named "Baku" (Robot Q), covering the entire build process from heads and batteries to legs and hands.
• In March, the facility reached record manufacturing output, producing more units in that month than in the company's entire prior history combined.
• Cost Reduction: Between Figure 2 and Figure 3, the manufacturing cost was reduced by approximately 90% through design shifts (e.g., reducing weight, slimming the chassis) and moving away from expensive CNC machining for early prototypes.
• Safety: Battery packs are engineered with internal thermal runaway containment and venting systems designed to prevent flames from ever exiting the pack.
• The company is currently piloting the use of Figure robots on production lines to build other Figure robots, aiming for "lights-out" manufacturing.

Product Evolution & Roadmap

• Figure 1 (2022): A high-cost ($100k+), cyberpunk-style prototype used to prove the company's vision and test early AI; featured a "Frankenstein" forearm with foot motors.
• Figure 2: Improved reliability and compute (tripled), integrated battery into the torso, and redesigned structure for load-bearing, but remained difficult to manufacture at scale.
• Figure 3: Features a "softer" aesthetic with foam padding, high-top sneaker footwear for thermal venting and aesthetics, and a new hand design with 30+ degrees of freedom and tactile sensors.
• Figure 4: Currently in the design phase, expected to be a "radical" step up similar to the transition from iPhone 1 to 2, focusing on further cost reduction and ease of use.
• The company estimates Figure 4 may represent the "iPhone moment" for humanoids, offering a radically different user experience and capability set.

Deployment & Use Cases

• Autonomous Operations: Robots operate 24/7 autonomously, docking themselves to charge and swapping out for maintenance or recharging within 30 seconds.
• White House Deployment: Figure 3 robots were the first humanoid robots to enter the White House, greeting visitors and assisting at an event with the First Lady.
• Automotive: Figure robots assisted in assembling a BMW X3, marking the first known instance of a humanoid robot building a car on an assembly line.
• Home & Commercial: The target pricing model for home use is $400–$600/month via a lease model; commercial deployments focus on logistics, manufacturing, and concierge services.
• Data Strategy: The company is collecting diverse, high-quality data globally (anonymized) to improve Helix generalization, aiming to overcome distributional gaps for worldwide deployment.

Team & Culture

• The company fosters a "sci-fi" culture, with executives citing movies like Contact, Westworld, and Ex Machina as inspirations for human-robot interaction design.
• Employees engage in data collection efforts, including wearing spandex suits with motion capture markers to teach robots human movement patterns.
• The company performed a live concert with the artist Deadmau5, where multiple Figure robots danced on stage synchronized to music.
• Future AI Vision: Leadership believes humanoids may achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) first due to the necessity of learning through physical interaction with the world (trial and error), rather than just text or image processing.

Security & Privacy

• Robots operate on 5G, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth but do not require network connectivity for core tasks as Helix runs inference on-board.
• The company has strict security protocols, including geofencing and tracking, with no reported IP thefts or robot escapes during testing.
• Data collected from deployed robots is anonymized to protect privacy while focusing on state-based visual data for model training.