Summary: Agility Robotics opened a 60,000-square-foot Fremont training facility for Digit near Tesla’s plant. The company reports more than $300 million in secured multi-year orders for roughly 1,000 robots. A planned reverse merger values Agility at about $2.5 billion.
Agility Robotics said on July 17, 2026 that it has opened a 60,000-square-foot training site for humanoid robots in Fremont, California, and the address is the point: it sits beside Tesla’s Fremont factory, the same plant where Tesla expects to start building its own Optimus humanoid this year. CEO Peggy Johnson did not sidestep the symbolism. “It’s great to have them in the same area as us, because really, for a long time Agility was out there alone.”
Why the Hub Sits Next Door to Tesla
Setting up a training center alongside a competitor’s production backyard is a statement all by itself. Elon Musk has called Optimus “the biggest product ever” and expects it to prove useful outside Tesla “sometime next year.” Johnson’s answer sounds untroubled: “We have commercialized. We now know what it takes to walk into these facilities and meet their safety bars.” She also offers a second frame for the moment, calling Agility “an acceleration story and a timing story” and saying “our biggest competitor right now is just us.” What the company is selling, then, is a record rather than a vision — humanoids that actually earn revenue at customer sites are rare, and Digit is one of them.
A Robot School of 60,000 Square Feet
The facility’s purpose is to teach Digit new skills in environments that look like real field conditions, so the gap between a signed contract and a working deployment gets shorter. Digit is a machine built solely for warehouse work: about 5 feet 9 inches tall and around 160 pounds, with reverse-bend knees and hands optimized for totes. Moving bins is the job it holds today: at a GXO logistics facility, Digits have moved more than 100,000 totes, and the customer list also includes Amazon, Schaeffler, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, which put seven robots to work in February. Co-founder Jonathan Hurst lays out a roadmap with no glamour in it at all: “Let’s start with the bins and the totes, and then let’s do the picking and the kitting,” with cardboard handling and trailer loading to follow — a market he sizes at 100 million robots and a trillion-dollar opportunity. This fall brings Digit version 5, which can sense humans and therefore no longer needs a robot-only operating zone.
Orders Above $300 Million, and the Route to Public Markets
The commercial figures are equally concrete. Agility holds more than $300 million in secured, multi-year contract orders covering roughly 1,000 robots, charged as monthly robots-as-a-service fees instead of an outright hardware sale, and more than 30 other customers are in deployment talks — talks that Johnson says already come with deployment plans in hand. The bigger capital move is a reverse merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI, the SPAC led by Michael Klein, that values Agility at roughly $2.5 billion and is expected to bring in gross proceeds above $620 million, which would be the largest capital raise in humanoid robotics history. Closing later this year as planned would make Agility the first pure-play publicly traded humanoid robotics company and give retail investors their first direct exposure to the sector. The proceeds go toward scaling production at its 70,000-square-foot facility in Salem, Oregon and funding the order pipeline.
Safety Before Everything, and No Home Robots
Agility’s chosen path sets it apart from some rivals. Co-founder Damion Shelton makes the engineering discipline plain: “You don’t want to get creative with your safety stack,” and, in Johnson’s words, “You can’t build your robot and then make it safe.” Safety-critical controls are kept separate from generative AI on purpose; the latter is used mostly to answer how robots can be programmed at scale, a question Shelton says generative AI has answered “definitively.” The company remains LLM-agnostic, turning to models such as Claude and Gemini to interpret instructions, and it counts its industrial safety certification plus its data lake of real-world robot operations — possibly the largest in the industry — as the edges that belong to the company alone. Consumer home robots, Johnson says, are “10-plus years” out, because warehouses keep fixed layouts while homes are chaotic. Against newer AI-driven challengers such as Figure, 1X, the Bot Company, and Sunday Robotics, and with more than a million unfilled US warehouse jobs as the labor backdrop, Agility’s wager sits on the loading dock rather than in the living room. Researchers who pioneered two-legged walking techniques founded the company in 2015, and it has spent a decade on the unglamorous parts of robotics — which is exactly what it is selling.