Artificial intelligence company Figure has raised $70 million towards its goal of commercializing humanoid robots.
The series A round, announced Wednesday (May 24), is part of a recent round of funding in the artificial intelligence (AI) space that will see the company address labor shortages and develop robots to perform jobs considered unsafe. It is intended to help develop
“Figure’s near-term goal is to introduce humanoids into the workforce, and we believe that structured, repetitive, and often dangerous work in warehouses is likely to be the first application. ,” the company’s founder and CEO, Brett Adcock, said in a news release. release.
“This round of investment will support early warehousing solution testing, allowing us to rapidly migrate and iterate ahead of commercial operation.”
Figure has completed building, integrating, and testing an alpha prototype of its autonomous humanoid robot, Figure 01, in the past 12 months, according to the release. The company also said it has identified applications for robots in industries with the most pressing labor shortages, including manufacturing, delivery, logistics, warehousing and retail.
The company’s funding announcement comes after two other companies announced multi-million dollar deals to fund AI projects.
On Tuesday (May 23), AI company Anthropic announced a $450 million Series C round, pledging the money to “develop useful, harmless, and honest AI systems” — an AI assistant capable of performing a wide range of functions — Claude ), including Various conversational and text processing tasks. ”
Also on Tuesday, London’s Builder.ai raised $250 million to expand its artificial AI-powered software platform, “empowering people to build software, not white people’s language full of experts. We are focused on using human conversation as the primary user interface for – A familiar canvas system in the no-code/low-code realm. ”
And while the technology is still making headlines, PYMNTS said Wednesday that the technology has been driving efficiencies for years, especially in the payments space, with automated machine learning (ML) and predictive AI solutions He wrote that it helps streamline previously manual processes such as corporate accounts payable. and fraud prevention.
Tom Randklev, global head of product at payment orchestration platform CellPoint Digital, said in an interview with PYMNTS that such areas are “the easiest and first” where the application of generative AI can have immediate effect. Said it would help.
“Generative AI can basically retrain older AI and machine learning models,” said Landcleff, adding that “we see a very interesting trajectory.” [for AI] As for payment. ”
