THE ROBOT IN YOUR KITCHEN

A DOZEN OR SO YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN, EYES obscured by VR headsets, shuffle around a faux kitchen in a tech company's Silicon Valley headquarters. Their arms are bent at the elbows, palms facing down.

- - DILYS NG

One stops to pick up a bottle of hot sauce from a counter, making sure to keep her hands in view of the camera on her headset at all times. Like her colleagues, she wears a T-shirt emblazoned with the word HUMAN.

Meters away, two humanoid robots, with bulbous joints and expressionless plastic domes for faces, stand at a desk. In front of each is a crumpled towel; to its right, a basket. In slow movements, each robot grabs a towel by its corners, flattens it out, folds it twice, and deposits it into the basket. More often than not, the towel catches on the edge of the basket and the robot freezes. Then an engineer steps in and returns the towel to a crumpled heap, and the sequence begins again.

This was the scene at the Silicon Valley headquarters of Figure AI on an August morning. The three-year-old startup was in a sprint ahead of the October announcement of its next robot, the Figure 03, which was undergoing top-secret training when TIME visited. The robots folding towels were the company's previous model, the Figure 02, operating the same software that the Figure 03 will use, and which, along with the headsetted human “pilots,” were collecting data to train the new robot. Figure hopes the Figure 03 will soon become the first robot suitable for carrying out domestic chores in the home, as well as all kinds of manual labor. They hope it will be their first mass-producible humanoid, eventually even working on its own production line. The launch is a critical moment for this startup of 360 people, which in September announced it had secured $1 billion in investment at a valuation of $39 billion, and which counts Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, OpenAI, and Microsoft among its investors. (Salesforce, whose CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff owns TIME, was also announced as an investor in September.)