Robotics startup funding has hit the highest point in years, boosted by another giant round for a developer of humanoid bots.

On Tuesday, San Jose, California-based Figure, the developer of general purpose humanoid robots, announced that it raised $1 billion in Series C financing. The round, led by Parkway Venture Capital, set a $39 billion post-money valuation for the company.

Figure, founded in 2022 by Archer founder Brett Adcock, plans to use the Series C money to scale its artificial intelligence platform and manufacturing capabilities. Other investors in the round include Brookfield Asset Management, Nvidia, Macquarie Capital, Intel Capital, Align Ventures, Tamarack Global, LG Technology Ventures, Salesforce 1, T-Mobile Ventures, and Qualcomm Ventures.

The startup is currently working on bots that can assist in household tasks as well as in the commercial workforce.

It’s both an extraordinarily ambitious and costly mission. That helps explain why the round qualifies as the largest robotics-related financing of 2025, per Crunchbase data.

Figure’s financing also bumped up total funding to the sector to more than $8.5 billion this year. That puts the space on track for its largest fundraising haul since 2021.

Other big fundraisers

While Figure is the only robotics startup to raise a billion-dollar round this year, several others have raised rounds in the hundreds of millions. U.S. funding to the space has been particularly strong, as illustrated below in a sample list of the largest funding recipients of the year.

This includes Neuralink, the developer of implantable brain-computer interfaces, which raised $650 million in a financing deal reported in May. While Neuralink isn’t a pure-play robotics company, it has applications in the space, including surgical robots for implanting its devices and technology to allow recipients of its implants to control robotic prosthetic limbs.

Apptronik, a spinoff from The University of Texas at Austin known for its flagship Apollo robot, was also in demand, securing $403 million in Series A and extension funding, led by B Capital and Capital Factory.

Field AI, a developer of AI systems for operating autonomous robots, was another major fundraiser, picking up $405 million across two consecutive rounds announced in August. The Irvine, California, startup counts Bezos Expeditions among its lead investors.

The Bot Co., which is focused on every person’s dream of robots that can do household chores, also picked up a big round. The San Francisco startup, founded last year, closed on $150 million in March, bringing total funding to date to $300 million.

Funding outpaces exits

Even as funding accelerates, we aren’t seeing much in the way of large-scale robotics acquisitions and IPOs this year. That’s not surprising, given that so many of investors’ most sought-after startups are still early stage.

Moreover, a traditional IPO or M&A deal isn’t the only way to measure success for these startups, particularly in an age when so many unicorns are staying private longer. Instead, what might get both investors and the rest of us excited would be the introduction of an affordable bot capable of doing more of our least favorite tasks.

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Illustration: Dom Guzman