The Figure 02 humanoid is targeting a range of applications, including in industrial and home environments. | Source: Figure AI
For humanoid robots to be useful, they need to be trained on real-world datasets. Humanoid developer Figure AI Inc. this week partnered with Brookfield Corp., an alternative asset manager with more than $1 trillion in assets and 100,000 residential units under management.
Toronto-based Brookfield will help Figure AI:
- Develop a large and diverse real-world humanoid pretraining dataset
- Build artificial intelligence infrastructure for scaling Helix, Figure’s proprietary vision-language-action (VLA) model
- Facilitate the deployment of humanoid robots in new commercial settings
Brookfield has also invested in Figure’s Series C fundraising as part of the broader partnership. The round, announced earlier this week, totaled over $1 billion. The latest round brought the San Jose, Calif.-based company‘s post-money valuation to $39 billion.
“This partnership marks a major milestone in our journey to build general-purpose humanoid robots,” said Brett Adcock, the founder and CEO of Figure AI. “Brookfield’s scale gives us an unmatched platform to capture massive amounts of real-world, humanlike navigation and manipulation data across a variety of household environments necessary to unlock general-purpose humanoid robots.”
In December 2024, Figure delivered Figure 02 systems to a paying customer. The company won a 2024 RBR50 Robotics Innovation Award for the fast pace of development of its humanoid robots.
Brookfield to help Figure build its dataset
Brookfield manages over 500 million sq. ft. (46.4 million sq. m) of commercial office space and 160 million sq. ft. (14.8 million sq. m) of logistics space. Figure said these types of environments are strategic and critical to its data collection project for Helix.
Using human video capture in a variety of Brookfield environments, Figure will amass critical AI training data for Helix to teach humanoid robots how to move, perceive, and act across a spectrum of human-centric spaces. Figure said it has already launched data-collection efforts in Brookfield environments and will continue to scale this program in the coming months.
In addition, the partnership will explore broader infrastructure collaboration — including support for next-generation GPU data centers, real estate for robotic training environments, and commercial use cases across Brookfield’s global footprint.
Brookfield and Figure will also explore opportunities to deploy humanoid robots within Brookfield’s portfolio over time. Figure said it has initiated early commercial deployments with select customers, and the addition of use cases within Brookfield’s platform will demonstrate the ability to scale utilization across different sectors and applications.
Learn more about humanoids at RoboBusiness 2025
Before humanoid deployments can scale, providers must address safety concerns, demonstrate flexibility and superiority to manual processes and existing robots, and meet market demand still subject to a wide range of predictions, noted industry experts.
These topics and more will be discussed at RoboBusiness 2025, which will be on Oct. 15 and 16 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The event will include tracks on humanoids, physical AI, enabling technologies, design and development, business, and field robotics.
Keynotes will include “Lessons Learned From the First Humanoid Deployments,” with Jim Fan, director of AI and a distinguished scientist at NVIDIA, and Pras Velagapudi, chief technology officer at Agility Robotics.
The humanoid track at RoboBusiness will include sessions on:
- “Humanoids for Real Applications: Mastering Safety and Performance,” with Nikolai Ensslen, CEO of Synapticon
- “Advancements in Humanoid Actuation,” with Jordan Schaeffler, strategic business development engineer at Novanta
- “Integrating Behavioral Science into Humanoid Design,” with Ram Devarajulu, vice president and head of robotics for North America at Cambridge Consultants
RoboBusiness, the premier event for developers and suppliers of commercial robots, will also feature more than 60 speakers, a startup workshop, and the annual Pitchfire competition. In addition, there will be numerous networking opportunities and over 100 exhibitors on the show floor.
Registration is now open for RoboBusiness 2025.
