humanoid-robotics
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Deng Taihua Wants the Robot to Show Up for Work
After two decades at Huawei, AgiBot’s co-founder has a plain test for humanoid robotics: can the machine do useful work again tomorrow?
Peng Zhihui Built a Bicycle That Could Steer Itself. Then He Built a Robot Company.
The online maker known as Zhihui Jun turned a self-driving bicycle and a robotic arm into an audience. At AgiBot, his work faces a harder test: making useful robots again and again.
Grace Brown Is Teaching Robots to Read the Room
The Andromeda founder started with a student-built robot that could ask about her day. Now she is scaling a company around a harder engineering problem: creating machines people actually want in the room.
Brett Adcock
Brett Adcock is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Figure AI, the humanoid robotics company valued at $39 billion after a $1B+ Series C in September 2025. Raised on a third-generation farm in central Illinois, Adcock built his first web companies at 16, co-founded and sold talent marketplace Vettery to Adecco for ~$100M in 2018, took eVTOL company Archer Aviation public on the NYSE at a $2.7B valuation, then pivoted to what he calls the hardest problem: building general-purpose humanoid robots. Figure's robots now work autonomously on BMW's production floor and have logged over 30,000 vehicles built. In 2025-2026, Adcock simultaneously launched Hark (personal AI hardware, $700M Series A at $6B valuation) and Cover (school weapon-detection tech). He is currently running three companies at once while publicly estimating his net worth at ~$19 billion.