Figure, a robotics startup, announced on Thursday that it had secured $675 million at a valuation of $2.6 billion from investors, which include Nvidia, Microsoft, and Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com.
Sunnyvale, Figure's California-based company, also announced that it has partnered with OpenAI to build generative AI for its humanoid robots.
Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT, which has generated great interest in AI, companies have invested millions of dollars to capitalize on the trend.
Align Ventures, Parkway Venture Capital, ARK Invest, Intel Capital, Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, and OpenAI Startup Fund are among the other companies that have contributed to the Figure investment.
The CEO and founder of Figure, Brett Adcock, stated that the company is going to use the funds to increase employment, speed up production, and create extensive language models for robotics.
According to Adcock, the company will also move its AI infrastructure and training to Microsoft Azure.
In order to enable Figure's humanoid robots to see, hear, and do physical tasks, Adcock said that the AI models the company builds will be based on OpenAI's most recent GPT models and particularly trained on robotics action data that Figure has gathered.
According to Peter Welinder, the vice president of product and partnerships at OpenAI, they have always planned to return to robotics, and they see an opportunity with Figure to find out what humanoid robots can accomplish when fueled by advanced multimodal models.
As software powered by AI opens up new possibilities for how robots might work and interact with humans, investors' interest in humanoid robots has increased. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, disclosed the company's most recent humanoid robot, the Optimus Gen, while also predicting that there will be a billion humanoid robots on Earth by the 2040s.
When Bloomberg first revealed last week that Figure was seeking money, it stated that Bezos had pledged $100 million via his company Explore Investments LLC, Microsoft was contributing $95 million, and Nvidia and a fund connected to Amazon were contributing $50 million each.
Figure last month established a collaboration with the BMW company in order to deploy its humanoid robots in the automaker's facility in the US.
Figure last year raised $70 million in its initial external round from investors headed by Parkway Venture Capital.