Meet Figure AI: The company behind the humanoid robot hosted by Melania Trump - CNBC

Two years ago, Figure AI was a robotics startup with a humanoid that could make coffee in a demo video. On March 25, 2026, its Figure 03 robot stood beside Melania Trump at the White House and addressed a global summit in 11 languages. In between, Figure raised more than $1.9 billion, accumulated a cap table that reads like a technology-sector power list, and became the most visible proxy bet for whether humanoid robots can transition from trade-show stages to factory floors.

The commercial evidence is thinner than the valuation implies. Figure's most documented commercial deployment is a pilot with BMW at the automaker's Spartanburg, South Carolina plant, where Figure 02 ran 10-hour shifts Monday through Friday, loading 90,000 parts over 1,250 hours of runtime and contributing to the production of 30,000 X3 vehicles, according to Figure's own announcement. Those numbers are real. They are also self-reported from Figure's blog, not independently audited, and the pilot ended months ago with no follow-on contract publicly announced. The company has not disclosed unit sales. It has not named a second commercial customer.

Standing between the institutional legitimacy and the deployment record is a federal lawsuit that has received substantially less coverage than the White House visit. Robert Gruendel, Figure's former head of product safety, filed a complaint in federal court in the Northern District of California in November 2025 alleging that Figure's next-generation humanoid robots moved at superhuman speed and generated force approximately twice the level required to fracture an adult human skull. Gruendel further alleged that a Figure robot malfunctioned and carved a gash into a steel refrigerator door. Figure called the allegations falsehoods and filed a countersuit in January 2026 accusing Gruendel of failing to do his job. Both parties are preparing to litigate. No court has ruled on any claim.

The lawsuit exposes the gap between what Figure shows the world and what happens when its machines operate in proximity to people. The BMW numbers are the closest thing to hard deployment data the company has published, and they cover a single customer, a controlled factory floor environment, and a task — parts loading — that is relatively structured compared to the unstructured manipulation the company says its robots will eventually perform. Figure 03, introduced in October 2025, has a redesigned hand with tactile sensors capable of detecting forces as small as 3 grams and wireless inductive charging at 2 kilowatts. Whether those specs translate into reliable human-adjacent operation at commercial scale is exactly what the lawsuit is designed to answer in a forum that does not depend on Figure's press release calendar.

Figure has made institutional credibility a deliberate strategy. The Series C announced in September 2025 raised more than $1 billion at a $39 billion post-money valuation led by Parkway Venture Capital with participation from Brookfield Asset Management, Nvidia, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Salesforce, and LG Technology Ventures, among others. That cap table brings something beyond capital: relationships with companies that buy computing infrastructure, automotive manufacturing capacity, and enterprise software at scale. Whether those relationships convert into commercial robot orders is the question Figure has not yet answered.

The company has also made choices that telegraph a confidence its deployment record does not yet validate. In February 2025, Figure publicly ended its partnership with OpenAI, citing a belief that large language models were becoming commoditized, and launched Helix, its own vision-language-action neural network. The Helix system runs two robots simultaneously using a dual-architecture design that separates high-level planning at 7 to 9 hertz from low-level control at 200 hertz. Whether building proprietary AI models in-house is a competitive moat or a distraction from the harder problem of getting robots to operate reliably next to humans is a question the next 12 months should answer.

In March 2025, Figure announced BotQ, a first-generation manufacturing facility targeting production of up to 12,000 humanoid robots per year, with a stated goal of 100,000 over four years. The numbers are enormous and forward-looking. Industry estimates place total Figure units shipped at roughly 150 through 2025, a figure Figure has not confirmed or denied publicly. The gap between a manufacturing target and a shipped count is where every robotics company lives, and it is where the Gruendel lawsuit becomes significant: if Figure is scaling production toward 12,000 units annually, the safety architecture of those machines matters not as a theoretical concern but as a manufacturing and liability question at commercial scale.

The White House appearance on March 25 was a genuine milestone. Melania Trump called Figure 03 her first American-made humanoid guest at the White House; Figure CEO Brett Adcock said it made history. Whether it was the first humanoid robot ever formally hosted there is a claim nobody has independently verified — but it is the claim the company and the first lady made together, and it reflects the deliberate institutional framing Figure has chosen. The question the appearance does not answer — and the question no press release attached to the event addressed — is what happens on the factory floor when the cameras are off and a robot operating at superhuman speed is sharing space with a human worker.

The answer will come from somewhere other than Figure's blog.