Silicon Valley is once again making headlines as local startups ramp up their efforts to bring humanoid robots into our everyday lives. Sunnyvale's Figure AI has landed a massive $675 million in venture funding, elevating the company's market value to a hefty $2.6 billion. In a statement obtained by NBC Bay Area, Gregg Hill, a venture capitalist backing Figure, elucidated the company's vision: "The whole goal here is to have billions of these in the market and actually be in the home." Hill emphasized the potential of these robots to simplify life, from performing household chores to enhancing home security.

The investment pot for Figure AI includes big-name players like Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Intel Capital, as well as personal funds from Jeff Bezos, through Bezos Expeditions. The cash infusion, as detailed on Figure's LinkedIn announcement, is destined for AI training, manufacturing, a scaling up of the engineering team, and pushing forward the commercial deployment of these automated counterparts.

Joining the robotics rush, San Jose-based Electric Sheep is on its own mission to create AI-driven helpers. According to NBC Bay Area, CEO Nag Murty shared their goal of spreading "billions of these cute, Wall-E, animal-like caretaker robots out there to help us and take care of the planet in a sustainable manner." Like Figure, Electric Sheep aims to ease the burden of day-to-day tasks, albeit with a focus on lawn maintenance.

Amidst these developments, Figure is not standing still, having penned an agreement with OpenAI to push the boundaries of humanoid robotics even further. The collaboration is set to hone the robots' ability to process and comprehend language, accelerating Figure’s path to commercial success. The tech community is buzzing about what this could mean for the future of "embodied AI" in our physical world, as the robots designed to coexist and assist in human environments come closer to reality.