Brett Adcock's $23 Billion Fortune Rests on a Humanoid Robot Bet

Brett Adcock has spent the past decade building companies around technologies that he believes will transform the future. His first major fortune came from Vettery, the job-search company he co-founded and sold for $110 million in 2018.

Figure founder and CEO Brett Adcock has built a multibillion-dollar fortune around his bet on humanoid robots and artificial intelligence. [Photo: NVIDIA]

Adcock later helped take air-taxi company Archer Aviation public through a SPAC transaction in 2021, raising $858 million at a valuation of about $1.7 billion before the company had begun commercial passenger flights.

His biggest bet is now Figure, the humanoid-robotics company he founded.

Investors valued Figure at $39 billion even as its robots remained largely in pilot projects and controlled demonstrations. 

Forbes estimates that Adcock's fortune has risen to about $23.4 billion, with most of the wealth tied to his stake in Figure. Adcock also founded Hark, an AI company that raised $700 million in a Series A round in May at a $6 billion valuation.

The company has been described as developing a universal AI assistant combining software with dedicated hardware.

The valuations have made Adcock one of the most prominent technology entrepreneurs betting on robotics and artificial intelligence. But Figure's valuation reflects expectations about the future as much as current commercial performance.

Figure's robots have demonstrated real capabilities, but the technology still faces substantial challenges before humanoids can perform a broad range of tasks reliably and at scale.

Forbes noted the gap between what the robots can do today and what Adcock predicts they will eventually be capable of doing.