Agility Robotics opens 70k sq ft humanoid factory in Tesla's backyard

Peggy Johnson sounds almost relieved to have company. For years, Agility Robotics was the lonely poster child for practical humanoids, watching a parade of well-funded startups promise the moon while her company’s spindly-legged Digit robot quietly moved totes in actual warehouses. That dynamic is shifting, and fast. Agility just cut the ribbon on a 70,000-square-foot robot training facility in Fremont, California — a stone’s throw from the factory where Tesla insists it will start building Optimus bots this year. The proximity feels symbolic.

Agility isn’t waiting for a future payday. Johnson, the CEO, says the company has already locked in $300 million in contract orders from heavy hitters like Amazon, GXO, and Toyota. Digit isn’t a prototype doing backflips on YouTube; it’s clocking in for shifts. At one GXO logistics site, the robot has moved 100,000 totes. That’s not a pilot project number — that’s production. While Elon Musk hypes Optimus as potentially “the biggest product ever,” Agility is generating revenue right now with a robot that stands six feet tall and handles the unglamorous work of moving bins.

This isn’t just a real estate story. Agility is in the middle of a reverse merger designed to make it the first pure-play humanoid company on the public markets later this year. It’s a bold move for a company founded in 2015 by researchers who figured out how to make bipedal walking safe. The rise of transformer-based AI has supercharged the industry, but Agility’s co-founder Damion Shelton draws a sharp line in the sand. “You don’t want to get creative with your safety stack,” he told TechCrunch, comparing it to not wanting a self-driving car’s anti-lock brakes controlled by generative AI. The real AI unlock, he argues, is handling the infinite number of tasks a robot might face — a problem too big for a team of engineers to code manually. Generative AI finally answers that scaling question.

Here’s where Agility parts ways with the sci-fi fantasies. Don’t expect a Digit in your kitchen folding laundry. Johnson and co-founder Jonathan Hurst are laser-focused on logistics and manufacturing, tackling progressively harder problems from tote-moving to cardboard handling and truck unloading. Hurst sees a path to 100 million robots and a trillion-dollar valuation just by mastering the tedious back-end of the global supply chain. With over 30 customers in talks for deployments, Agility’s new facility will teach Digit new tricks in simulated real-world environments. The next version, arriving this fall, will sense humans and step outside the robot-only safety cages — a quiet, practical evolution that matters more than any flashy demo.