The hottest pre-IPO stock? An AI robotics startup with bold claims, little revenue

Figure has signed BMW as its first commercial customer and predict it will generate $9 bn in revenue by 2029

- Emily Glazer, Berber Jin & Alexander Saeedy

In February, a little-known startup promising to build futuristic robots set out to raise new cash at a nearly $40 billion valuation. The pitch: Figure AI would put more than 200,000 robots across assembly lines and homes by 2029—solving an engineering challenge that has eluded hardware developers for decades.

It has a long way to go. Figure had no revenue last year and just a few dozen robots in production, according to documents shared with investors in recent weeks. The documents show Figure has signed BMW as its first commercial customer and predict it will generate $9 billion in revenue by 2029.

On March 24, Figure's founder, Brett Adcock, wrote that his startup was the "#1 most sought-after private stock in the secondary market"—sharing a list that put Figure above SpaceX and OpenAI.

How such a startup decided it could raise money at a price tag that would make it among America's most valuable private companies is confounding investors across Silicon Valley. Had Adcock leap-frogged the likes of Tesla and Google in developing autonomous robots? Or, they wondered, was this a sign that the AI bubble was hitting its peak?

Adcock, a serial entrepreneur, has been posting frequently on social media about how much interest there has been in Figure's shares and touting the BMW partnership as proof of the three-year-old company's rapid progress. Adcock didn't respond to requests for comment.

In a March 31 post, where he shared a video of the slender humanoids working on assembly tasks for BMW, Adcock wrote: "This isn't a test—this is what autonomous robots in production operations look like Turn the music up!"

A BMW spokesman said on April 1 the automaker had three of the robots at its facility for technical evaluation. "Only one is used at a time, but the robot has practiced picking up and grasping parts during nonproduction hours in our body shop," the spokesman said.