BMW x Figure (Spartanburg)

Sunnyvale-based humanoid-robotics company founded in 2022, among the fastest-moving US humanoid developers from prototype to production partnership. Its industrial humanoid [Figure 02](/models/figure-02) ran a flagship production deployment at [BMW](/companies/bmw)'s Spartanburg plant (since ended); the next-generation [Figure 03](/models/figure-03) (with notably dexterous hands, 16 DoF per hand) is its current platform, increasingly oriented toward both industrial RaaS and eventual home use. Figure develops its own [Helix](/brains/helix) vision-language-action AI and operates BotQ, a manufacturing facility tooled to produce up to ~12,000 Figure robots per year. Financials: Figure raised over $1 billion in a Series C (September 2025) at a $39 billion valuation, a roughly 15x jump from its $2.6 billion valuation in February 2024, bringing total funding raised to roughly $1.7 billion. Investors include NVIDIA and Qualcomm Ventures. Reality check: Figure's elevated valuation is partly home-market optionality; CEO [Brett Adcock](/people/brett-adcock) has acknowledged home autonomy is not yet ready for unsupervised operation, so near-term revenue is industrial robots-as-a-service. The BMW deployment, though small in unit count, represents genuine factory integration rather than lab demos. BotQ's 12,000/yr is production capacity, not current output.

BMW Group is the global automotive manufacturer whose Spartanburg plant hosted the world's first publicly-documented production-scale humanoid robot deployment in automotive manufacturing. Headquartered in Munich and listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, BMW operates a global production network across more than 30 sites in 15 countries, producing BMW, MINI, and Rolls-Royce vehicles. Following the completion of an 11-month Figure 02 pilot at Plant Spartanburg in November 2025, BMW formalized its physical-AI strategy through the establishment of the Center of Competence for Physical AI in Production, headquartered in Munich, and expanded humanoid deployments to Plant Leipzig in Germany with AEON robots from [Hexagon robotics](/companies/hexagon-robotics). Milan Nedeljković, the executive who led BMW's humanoid program from the Spartanburg pilot through the Leipzig expansion, became BMW Group's CEO effective May 14, 2026. BMW's editorial significance is its phased multi-vendor humanoid evaluation strategy. The company has structured its physical-AI deployment as a deliberately staged path, theoretical assessment, laboratory testing, initial test deployment, full pilot, and has run completed pilots with two different humanoid vendors (Figure AI bipedal, Hexagon Robotics wheeled) across two continents (US and Germany). The leadership transition that brought the humanoid-program executive to the CEO role in May 2026 is a meaningful corporate signal: humanoid integration is now a CEO-level priority at one of the world's largest automotive manufacturers.