Fact-Checked & Verified Editorial

Brett Adcock

Brett Adcock co-founded Vettery and Archer Aviation, then started Figure AI in 2022. How the humanoid robot maker reached a $39 billion valuation.

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A Farm in Moweaqua, Illinois

Brett Adcock grew up on a third-generation farm in Moweaqua, a small town in central Illinois, according to a 2023 profile by the University of Florida's Warrington College of Business. The same profile says he built his first software company at 15. He described his approach to that interviewer in plain terms: "I want to design and work on projects that can be really helpful for the world."

His career since then has followed one pattern. He starts a company with a large, specific target, sells or leaves it once it is established, and puts the proceeds and his reputation into something harder.

Vettery and the $100 Million Exit

His first large exit came from Vettery, an online recruiting marketplace he co-founded with Adam Goldstein. Job seekers built a profile, employers sent interview requests, and Vettery paid the candidate a signing bonus when a job was accepted, with a staff "talent executive" handling the process in between. By 2018 the company said it worked with more than 4,000 employers filling roles in IT, sales, and finance, and it had raised $11.9 million from investors including Greycroft and Raine Ventures.

In February 2018 the staffing company Adecco Group bought Vettery. The terms were not disclosed, but TechCrunch reported, citing a source with knowledge of the deal, that the price was a little over $100 million. Adcock and Goldstein stayed on to run the team after the sale.

Archer Aviation and the Board Split of 2022

The same two founders started Archer Aviation in October 2018 to build electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, a category often described as air taxis. Archer went public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company in September 2021, with Adcock and Goldstein as co-CEOs and co-chairs.

The arrangement lasted about seven months. On April 21, 2022, Archer said Adcock was stepping down as co-CEO to simplify the company's operating structure, leaving Goldstein in charge. Less than three weeks later, on May 9, he resigned from the board. In his resignation he said his "vision for Archer is not the same as that of the current board of directors," and listed what he had helped do there: raise more than $1 billion, take the company public, and develop its Maker aircraft.

He then sold much of his stake. InvestorPlace, reading his ownership filings, reported that he held 37.01 million Archer shares in September 2021 and 28.55 million in January 2023. By August 23, 2023 the figure was 11.51 million shares, about 5.5 percent of the company, after a run of sales in which he converted Class B stock into Class A shares and sold them on the open market. His last sale in that report was 500,000 shares at an average price of $7.29.

Figure AI and the BMW Plant in Spartanburg

Adcock founded Figure AI in 2022 to build a general-purpose humanoid robot: a machine with two arms and two legs that could work in spaces designed for people instead of a factory rebuilt around it. Most commercial robots are fixed to one task. His argument, made when Figure signed its first commercial customer, was that "single-purpose robotics have saturated the commercial market for decades, but the potential of general purpose robotics is completely untapped."

That first customer was BMW. In January 2024 Figure announced an agreement to deploy its robots in BMW Manufacturing's production facilities, starting with the plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

The Rounds That Took Figure to $39 Billion

On February 29, 2024, Figure announced $675 million in new funding at a $2.6 billion valuation, CNBC reported. The investors included Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, Microsoft, Intel's venture arm, and Ark Invest, and the round was announced together with a collaboration agreement with OpenAI.

Eighteen months later the price had risen fifteenfold. On September 16, 2025, Figure said it had raised more than $1 billion in committed capital in a Series C round at a post-money valuation of $39 billion. Parkway Venture Capital led it, with Brookfield Asset Management, Nvidia, Macquarie Capital, Intel Capital, Align Ventures, Salesforce, Qualcomm Ventures, and others taking part. The company said the money would go to its Helix AI system, its BotQ manufacturing operation, and GPU infrastructure for training.

Forbes reports that in 2025 Adcock also started Hark, a company building AI-powered consumer electronics, which it says was valued at more than $6 billion in a 2026 funding round.

How the $23.4 Billion Figure Is Built

Figure is private and has not published its ownership table, so any number for Adcock's wealth is an estimate. This article uses the Forbes real-time estimate of $23.4 billion, as displayed on his Forbes profile on September 21, 2026.

Most of that figure comes from one input. Forbes estimates that Adcock owns about 50 percent of Figure. Applied to the $39 billion post-money valuation from the September 2025 round, that stake would be worth roughly $19.5 billion before any discount for illiquidity or later dilution. Forbes does not itemize the remaining $3.9 billion or so; his other known holdings are the Archer shares he kept and his stake in Hark. The main uncertainty is the 50 percent stake itself, which neither Adcock nor Figure has confirmed.

Palo Alto and Three Children

In the 2023 University of Florida profile, Adcock was living in Palo Alto, California, with two children. In October 2024 he posted on X that a third child had been born, describing the household as "newborn / 3 kids." He has not named the children publicly, and this article does not either.

Sources

Filed Under Topics

#Technology#Robotics#Figure AI#Archer Aviation#Founders