Brett Adcock

Brett Adcock (born 1986, raised on an Illinois farm) is a serial founder: he sold the talent marketplace Vettery for roughly $100 million in 2018, co-founded the electric air-taxi company Archer Aviation the same year and took it public, then founded Figure AI in 2022 — seeding it with $100 million of his own money — to build general-purpose humanoid robots.

Synthetic humans for the jobs nobody wants

Figure’s stated mission is to eliminate the need for unsafe and undesirable jobs by putting humanoids to work where labor is scarce, repetitive, or dangerous. In January 2024 it signed a deal with BMW, and Figure 02 robots were deployed at the automaker’s Spartanburg plant on sheet-metal handling tasks. A February 2024 funding round — $675 million from Microsoft, OpenAI, Nvidia, and Jeff Bezos at a $2.6 billion valuation — came with an OpenAI collaboration that Adcock ended a year later, boasting that his in-house team was “running circles around OpenAI” with its Helix robot brain. By 2025 Figure was valued near $39 billion, and TIME named Adcock to its TIME100 AI list.

Adcock talks in civilizational terms — predicting humanoids doing general-purpose work within years and eventually outnumbering people at industrial sites. Skeptics push back: a 2025 Fortune investigation found the celebrated BMW deployment was smaller and more limited than his publicity suggested, and roboticists caution that reliable general-purpose manipulation remains unsolved. He has threatened litigation over such reporting while continuing to post demo after demo.