Agility

History

Agility Robotics has rapidly evolved from academic research to commercial leader, securing major partnerships and deploying robots in real-world commercial settings.

• 2015: Agility Robotics founded as a spin-off from Oregon State University's Dynamic Robotics Laboratory by Dr. Jonathan Hurst, Dr. Damion Shelton, and Mikhail Jones
• October 2016: Raised $792,000 seed round led by The Robotics Hub
• 2016: Cassie bipedal research platform announced, funded by $1 million DARPA grant
• February 2017: Cassie publicly unveiled as a research platform for academic institutions
• March 2018: Raised $8 million Series A led by Playground Global with Sony Innovation Fund
• October 2020: Raised $20 million Series B led by DCVC and Playground Global with TDK Ventures and MFV Partners
• April 2022: Raised $150 million Series B led by DCVC and Playground Global with Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund joining as strategic investor
• March 2023: Digit v4 unveiled at ProMat trade show as the first generation designed for mass manufacturing
• September 2023: Opened "RoboFab" in Salem, Oregon - the world's first factory dedicated to humanoid robot manufacturing, with capacity for 10,000+ robots annually
• 2023: Began pilot program with Amazon at R&D facility near Seattle for tote recycling workflows
• October 2024: Deployed Digit robots at BMW's Spartanburg manufacturing plant for autonomous assembly tasks via partnership with Schaeffler Group
• November 2024: Announced strategic investment and partnership with Schaeffler Group ($51M corporate round)
• June 2024: Signed industry's first multi-year Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) agreement with GXO Logistics for commercial deployment at Spanx facility
• February 2025: Announced partnership with Manhattan Associates to integrate Agility Arc platform directly into Manhattan Active WMS
• June 2025: Raised $400 million Series C3 round led by WP Global and SoftBank Group
• 2025: General commercial availability opens for Digit via RaaS subscription model

Manufacturing Excellence

Agility has developed "RoboFab," a 70,000-square-foot facility in Salem, Oregon that represents a breakthrough in humanoid robot manufacturing. Unlike traditional heavy-industry approaches, Agility uses a proprietary "CapEx light" assembly system called ARMS (Agility Robot Manufacturing System), designed as a replicable blueprint for rapidly building additional factories. The facility can produce hundreds of robots in its first year, scaling to over 10,000 robots annually at full capacity. In a "dogfooding" approach, Digit robots work alongside humans within the RoboFab factory itself, performing material handling tasks on the assembly line.

Hybrid AI Technology

Agility's technological differentiation lies in its hybrid approach to artificial intelligence. Rather than pursuing "end-to-end" AI that controls every aspect of the robot, Agility built a foundation of robust, engineered, physics-based controls for locomotion and stability—drawing from over a decade of academic research on bipedal movement. On top of this foundation, they layer a proprietary "whole-body control foundation model" that functions as a "motor cortex." This relatively small LSTM (long short-term memory) neural network, with fewer than 1 million parameters, acts as a coordination layer that takes high-level commands and translates them into objectives for the low-level controllers. The model is trained purely in NVIDIA's Isaac Sim simulation environment for the equivalent of "decades of simulated time" over just a few days, then transferred "zero-shot" to real robots without requiring real-world fine-tuning. This simulation-to-real approach enables extremely rapid development and deployment of new skills.

Strategic Ecosystem

Agility's competitive advantage extends beyond technology to its strategic partnership ecosystem. The company has cultivated "customer-investor" relationships with industry leaders:

GXO Logistics - Following a 2023 pilot, GXO signed the industry's first multi-year RaaS agreement for humanoid robots in June 2024. Digit is commercially deployed at a GXO-managed Spanx facility, moving totes from AMRs to conveyors.

Amazon - Both a key investor via its Industrial Innovation Fund and a pilot customer, Amazon tests Digit at its R&D facility near Seattle for tote recycling workflows, validating the robot for the world's largest logistics operator.

NVIDIA - A core technology partner and investor (via NVentures), NVIDIA provides the simulation platform (Isaac Sim/Omniverse) where Digit's AI "motor cortex" is trained, as well as the onboard compute hardware (moving to Jetson AGX Thor).

Manhattan Associates - This software integration partnership embeds Agility's Arc fleet management platform directly into Manhattan Active WMS, making Digit a "native" automation solution for warehouses running Manhattan's software.

Schaeffler Group - A motion technology company that is both an investor and deployment partner, testing Digit in real manufacturing environments and providing expertise in mechanical systems.

Philosophy: Form Follows Function

Unlike competitors pursuing human-like aesthetics, Agility's design philosophy is summarized as "Form Follows Function" and "Humanoid is a result, it's not the goal." The company set out to build robots that could operate effectively in human-centric spaces—environments with stairs, narrow aisles, and uneven surfaces that wheeled robots cannot navigate. This pragmatic, engineering-first approach led naturally to a bipedal form as the most efficient solution. Digit's design reflects this philosophy with bird-like "digitigrade" legs rather than human-mimicking ones, optimizing for stability and efficiency over anthropomorphic appearance. The company focuses on solving specific, high-ROI problems for the logistics industry today rather than pursuing speculative general-purpose capabilities.