On May 26, US humanoid robot maker Figure and retail holding company Catalyst Brands announced a commercial agreement. Catalyst Brands owns the JCPenney, Aéropostale, Brooks Brothers, Lucky Brand, and Nautica chains — about 1,800 retail locations across the US and Canada. Figure’s robots will begin working at the company’s distribution center in Reno, Nevada. The center receives goods, sorts them, and ships them out to stores across all of Catalyst’s brands. The robots will not appear in the stores themselves — this is strictly about warehouse logistics.
The robots’ specific task is to help warehouse staff operate a sorting system called Joey Pouch — an automated conveyor line that takes in items, packages them, and routes them to shipping destinations. Before signing the agreement, Figure ran a trial in which its robots sorted 88,000 packages over 72 hours and ran continuously for more than 24 hours without stopping. The Reno warehouse itself is no random choice: in 2024 Catalyst invested $40 million in modernizing the facility, so the robots are joining an environment already prepared for automation.
The most unusual detail of the deal is not the technology itself but who is behind it. The large investment fund Brookfield has put money into both Figure and Catalyst Brands — into both companies at once. In effect, the same investor has directed a robot maker it owns a stake in (Figure) to serve a retailer it also owns a stake in (Catalyst). This is a new model for the industry: an investment fund acting not just as a source of funding but as a channel for deploying technology into a real business. If the Catalyst rollout goes well, the logical next step is other retail and logistics companies in Brookfield’s portfolio.
Both sides in the press release specifically mentioned the possibility of “quick scalability” — a hint that the rollout will not be limited to a single warehouse in Reno. The exact number of robots, the timeline for expansion, and the financial terms of the agreement have not been disclosed. Against the backdrop of the Boston and Tokyo robotics conferences taking place this week, where the focus is on what humanoids can actually do today, the Figure–Catalyst deal offers a concrete answer: a major American retailer is moving from pilot projects to large-scale commercial use of humanoid robots.