Silicon Valley's humanoid robot startups appear to have lower acceptance rates than any Ivy League school.
Figure AI has received a large volume of resumes since its founding in 2022, said Brett Adcock, the company's founder and CEO.
“I just checked and Figure has received 176,000 job applications over the past three years,” he wrote in an X post on Saturday. “We employed about 425 people.”
This corresponds to an adoption rate of approximately 0.24% over three years. Mr Adcock wrote that most of the entries were “sloppy”.
It is unclear how the 176,000 applications spread over three years. Adcock did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Even if the number of applications were evenly divided in the year that Figure AI was operational (just under 59,000 applications per year), the acceptance rate would still be lower than the acceptance rate of the most difficult universities to get into. According to U.S. News & World Report's ranking list, California Institute of Technology had the lowest acceptance rate at 3%.
In a comment on a post to X, Adcock wrote that the review process was difficult.
“We go through each of these like monkeys. It's incredibly time consuming,” he wrote.
According to the CEO, an “ATS” or applicant tracking system (software used by employers to sift through resumes) won't save much time when a company is inundated with hundreds of thousands of applications.
“ATS requires at least 20 seconds of button clicks for each submission, even if it's garbage,” he wrote.
Adcock did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Companies like Figure AI sit at the exact intersection of two trends in the job market.
Today's job seekers aren't just applying for a handful of positions. Business Insider's chief correspondent Aki Ito cited data from Greenhouse, a leading ATS platform, reporting that the average number of job openings received 242 applications.
“Applying for a job in 2025 is statistically equivalent to throwing your resume into a black hole,” Ito wrote.
Figure AI, on the other hand, works in one of the hottest areas in the technology industry: robotics and artificial intelligence.
Top technology companies like Meta and OpenAI are in the midst of a war for AI talent, offering salary packages of up to seven to nine figures just to poach superstar AI researchers.
Even tech startups are cutting corners on recruiting AI talent and offering perks that aren't so easily available at larger companies, such as higher equity packages, co-founder titles and more research time.
Figure AI is one of the leading names in the humanoid robot space.
The company recently raised more than $1 billion in a Series C funding round with backing from Parkway Venture Capital, Brookfield Asset Management, Nvidia and others, giving it a valuation of $39 billion.
Mr Adcock told X that he may need to find another way to scrutinize resumes.
“We need a model for doing this better. Maybe I'll work on it,” he wrote.
