Parkway Venture Capital Ranks First in 2026 Emerging VC Firms
Parkway Tops Emerging VC List
Brett Adcock, founder of Figure, stated that Parkway Venture Capital ranks first in the 2026 emerging VC firms list and is the earliest external VC partner to invest in Figure.
The list was published by Ilya Strebulaev, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, with Parkway scoring 3,221 points to take the top spot; Factorial Funds ranked second with 2,958 points, and Future Ventures third with 2,875 points. Parkway is ranked 19th overall among all VC firms, ahead of several older funds.
Parkway's investment in Figure began with an approximately $70 million Series A round in 2023 and continued to lead subsequent financing rounds. Public reports indicate that Parkway participated in all major financing rounds from Figure's early humanoid robot development to large-scale training data and production infrastructure phases, forming a highly concentrated long-term holding relationship.
Figure completed over $1 billion in Series C financing in September 2025, with a post-investment valuation of approximately $39 billion; participants included Parkway, Brookfield Asset Management, Nvidia, Intel Capital, Microsoft, OpenAI Startup Fund, and ARK Investment Management. The valuation is based on private financing metrics and does not represent immediate realizable prices in the public market.
Recently, Figure launched the Index platform to collect human work videos in home and business environments for training robots, compensating individuals for their contributions; the company claims the platform has over 44,000 weekly active users, collecting about 30 minutes of video per second, equivalent to approximately 4.9 years of human activity records daily. Brett Adcock stated that Figure plans to invest $1 billion in such training data.
Market mechanisms indicate that Parkway's ranking rise comes from its early holdings and valuation re-evaluation in high-growth robotic assets like Figure; fund buyers will focus on whether it can continue to secure early project shares in AI, robotics, and automation. The subsequent value of Figure will depend on whether humanoid robots can convert training data, model capabilities, hardware production, and customer deployment into actual revenue; early funds benefit from valuation increases, while later investors bear the risks of high valuations, insufficient liquidity, and commercialization realization.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
The case of Parkway illustrates that emerging funds in the hard tech sector do not necessarily succeed by relying on a large number of projects, but may instead build returns through a few highly certain founders and continuous investments. Figure was founded in 2022, and Parkway entered with approximately $70 million in Series A in 2023, maintaining lead or core holdings in subsequent financing; when the company reached a valuation of about $39 billion in the 2025 Series C, the value difference between early costs and later prices quickly became apparent. This path is similar to the concentrated return logic of early bets by Founders Fund on SpaceX and Benchmark on eBay.
The capital path has shifted from "investing in robot bodies" to "controlling robot learning data." Figure is investing $1 billion in Index to collect videos of human operations in home and work environments; these videos serve not only as training materials but also constitute proprietary mappings between tasks, objects, scenes, and human actions. Parkway's early capital helped Figure first acquire equity in hardware companies, and then participate in a more complete asset chain of training data, models, manufacturing, and deployment through continuous financing, avoiding being confined to a single robot hardware valuation framework.
Compared to Tesla Optimus, Boston Dynamics, and China's Unitree and AgiBot, Figure is currently transitioning from prototype demonstration to data scaling and commercial deployment validation. Tesla's advantage lies in electric vehicle manufacturing and visual data foundation, Boston Dynamics has long accumulated motion control and high-performance electromechanical systems, while Figure attempts to establish a human behavior data flywheel with Index. The similarity lies in the need for massive funding; the difference is that Figure outsources data collection as platform tasks, and if supply is stable, the training iteration speed may surpass routes relying solely on internal demonstration data.
Essentially, it is about capital concentration: humanoid robots require not just a good model or a robotic arm, but continuous financing to support data payments, GPU training, supply chains, factories, deployment testing, and after-sales maintenance. Once early investors establish sufficient holdings in leading companies, they can gather scarce capital, industry partners, and data resources onto a single platform through continuous rounds of financing; however, this also makes valuations highly dependent on the realization of future robot orders and unit economics, with unprofitable high-valuation assets facing the greatest revaluation pressure when financing windows shrink.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
VC returns do not rely on diversification, but on continuous investments at the right inflection points.
The upper limit of robot competition lies not in hardware but in training data.
Early equity buys a share, while continuous investment buys control.