Research·note·Apr 2025·3 min read
The Humanoid That Cooks, Works, and May Soon Be in Your Home
RoboticsApplied AI
Artificial intelligence no longer lives only on screens and in server racks. It walks, talks, and, in Figure’s demo reels, cooks. Figure, a robotics startup in Sunnyvale, California, is betting that Figure 02 can move from factory aisles into kitchens. Backed by more than $700 million from Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon and others, the company is past the prototype-on-a-stage phase and into production bets.
What Figure 02 actually does
Released in August 2024, Figure 02 is a bipedal robot 1.70 m tall and 70 kg, built to copy human motion with unusually fine motor control. Six RGB cameras and a vision-language-action network (Helix VLA) let it:
- Follow spoken commands in natural language.
- Pick up objects of almost any shape, including ones it has not been trained on.
- Handle multi-step work such as cooking or assembling parts.
Its battery is 50% larger than Figure 01’s, good for up to eight hours of continuous work. NVIDIA RTX GPUs triple onboard compute. In the company’s own tests, Figure 02 is four times faster and seven times more accurate than the first pilot units.
From the factory floor to the living room
Figure 02 is already on the line at BMW’s plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina, under a deal announced in January 2024. It moves components and assists with assembly, work the company frames against a McKinsey estimate that the world could be short 85 million workers by 2030. Figure is not stopping at factories. In February 2025, CEO Brett Adcock said home trials would start this year, with a goal of putting humanoids in houses in under two years: dishes, living rooms, older adults, all while the robot keeps learning the layout of a particular home.
BotQ: the humanoid factory
To make that schedule plausible, Figure opened BotQ in California in March 2025, a plant rated for 12,000 humanoids a year. The unusual part: Figure 02 units help assemble other Figure 02 units, with AI running the line. Vertical integration is the bet for quality, cost, and scale.
Who is writing the checks
In February 2024, Figure closed a $675 million round that included Jeff Bezos (through Explore Investments), Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel, and Amazon, at a $2.6 billion valuation. Goldman Sachs puts the humanoid market at $6.8 billion by 2030. Citi’s more aggressive case reaches $7 trillion by 2050.
Hype, or something you can actually buy?
Helix lets Figure 02 adapt to rooms it has not seen, but household work that looks simple to people — folding laundry with any precision, for instance — still needs work. Analysts put early unit prices in the $20,000–$50,000 range, which would keep the first wave out of most homes until costs fall. Tom Andersson of STIQ Ltd. still expects humanoids to be ordinary within a decade, especially in aging societies such as Japan and the United States.
Figure is not only shipping hardware. It is trying to define a category. From BMW to a kitchen counter, Figure 02 is one of the clearer bets that AI will not only answer questions, but stand next to you and do the work. Whether you want that in the house is a different question.