Kat Scott says she has never seen a Figure robot at an event
The robotics engineer says the people she talks to think humanoids are a bubble, and that only two companies have real revenue.
Kat Scott (@kscottz) posted that she is at most major robotics events and has never even seen a Figure robot. She added that the prevailing opinion among the people she talks to in the industry is that humanoids are a bubble waiting to pop, and that @REK and Unitree are the only companies with appreciable revenue.
It is a short post, and it is worth being exact about what it is. Scott is describing show floors and conversations, not a tally of deployed units. A robot that is working inside a customer site does not turn up at a conference booth, so absence from events is not the same as absence from the world. What the post does capture is a gap between how loud a company is online and how often people in the field actually run into its hardware.
The context it landed in
The post arrived alongside a Figure profile flagged by Reuters reporter Anna Tong (@annatonger), who called Brett Adcock one of humanoid robotics' biggest hype men. Tong's numbers are the ones that make the argument concrete. Figure is valued at $39B. Forbes puts Adcock's net worth at $23.4B. And nearly two years ago, Tong writes, Adcock said he saw a path to 100,000 robots across two customers in four years.
Nobody in these sources says how many Figure robots exist today. That number is the whole question and it is not public here.
Shown versus claimed
This is one engineer's read on what she has seen, amplified by a reporter's framing of a founder's old projection. It is not an audit. Scott's revenue claim about @REK and Unitree is her assessment and no figures are attached to it. The useful part is the temperature check, which lines up with a running argument in the field about whether humanoid capability is tracking the valuations, including earlier pushback on Adcock's own staged roadmap for the technology.
The prevailing opinion of people I talk to in the robotics industy is that humanoids are a bubble waiting to pop.
I'm at most major robotics events and I've never even seen a Figure robot.