Microsoft and OpenAI are reportedly investing large sums of money into a humanoid robot startup at the beginning of the year. Among them, Microsoft plans to invest US$95 million, and OpenAI will invest US$5 million. According to Bloomberg, the company is expected to raise a total of US$500 million in this round, and its pre-money valuation may reach US$1.9 billion.
This company was founded in 2022. In May last year, it just raised US$70 million in financing led by Parkway Venture Capital. Two months later, Intel invested US$9 million. Unexpectedly, the company’s valuation doubled again in less than a year. Count over.
However, this latest round of financing has not yet been finalized, the investment amount may change, and the deal may not go through. Even so, netizens have already started calling Musk.
As mentioned above, Figure is a startup robotics company based in the United States that specializes in general-purpose humanoid robots. The company’s founder and CEO is Brett Adcock.
Before founding Figure, Brett founded Archer Aviation, a company that makes all-electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. Archer Aviation is publicly listed on the New York Stock Exchange with a valuation of $2.7 billion and has a $1.5 billion commercial agreement with United Airlines.
According to reports, its power is that by watching human demonstration videos, it can learn and complete tasks such as making coffee completely autonomously in just 10 hours of end-to-end training .
In addition, OpenAI has also made many deployments in humanoid robots. They also support 1X Technologies , a Norwegian humanoid robotics company. 1X Technologies, formerly known as Halodi Robotics, was founded 10 years ago by Bernt Øivind Børnich. In 2022, 1X Technologies reached a cooperation with OpenAI to use AI models to add intelligence to robots. In March last year, 1X Technologies received $23.5 million in financing led by OpenAI Venture Fund.
