On July 17, 2026, humanoid robotics company Agility Robotics opened a 60,000-square-foot training facility in Fremont, California — right next to Tesla’s Fremont factory, where Tesla is expected to begin manufacturing its competing Optimus robot this year. CEO Peggy Johnson did not dodge the symbolism of the address: “It’s great to have them in the same area as us, because really, for a long time Agility was out there alone.”
Why Right Next to Tesla
Putting a training center in a rival’s manufacturing backyard is a statement in itself. Elon Musk has called Optimus “the biggest product ever” and expects it to be useful outside Tesla “sometime next year.” Johnson’s counter is unbothered: “We have commercialized. We now know what it takes to walk into these facilities and meet their safety bars.” Her other framing of the moment is telling — Agility, she says, is “an acceleration story and a timing story,” and “our biggest competitor right now is just us.” In other words, Agility is selling a track record rather than a vision: Digit is one of the few humanoids actually generating revenue on customer sites today.
A 60,000-Square-Foot Robot School
The new facility’s job is to teach Digit new skills in environments that replicate real-world field conditions, shortening the path from signed contract to working deployment. Digit itself is a purpose-built warehouse worker: roughly 5 feet 9 inches tall, about 160 pounds, with reverse-bend knees and hands optimized for totes. Its core work today is moving bins: 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 draws a deliberately unglamorous roadmap: “Let’s start with the bins and the totes, and then let’s do the picking and the kitting,” expanding later into cardboard handling and trailer loading — a market he sizes at 100 million robots and a trillion-dollar opportunity. This fall, the company will unveil Digit version 5, which can sense humans and will no longer require a robot-only operating zone.
$300 Million in Orders and the Road to Public Markets
The commercial numbers are just as concrete. Agility holds more than $300 million in secured, multi-year contract orders covering roughly 1,000 robots under a robots-as-a-service model that charges monthly fees rather than selling hardware outright. More than 30 additional customers are in deployment talks, and Johnson says those customers already have deployment plans in hand. The bigger capital move is a reverse merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI, a SPAC led by Michael Klein, valuing Agility at roughly $2.5 billion with expected gross proceeds above $620 million — which would be the largest capital raise in humanoid robotics history. If the deal closes later this year as planned, Agility will become the first pure-play publicly traded humanoid robotics company, giving retail investors their first direct exposure to the sector. The proceeds will scale production at its 70,000-square-foot facility in Salem, Oregon, and fund the order pipeline.
Safety First, No Home Robots
Agility’s route differs sharply from some rivals. Co-founder Damion Shelton is blunt about the engineering discipline: “You don’t want to get creative with your safety stack,” and, as Johnson puts it, “You can’t build your robot and then make it safe.” The company deliberately separates safety-critical controls from generative AI, using the latter mainly to answer the question of how to program robots at scale — a question Shelton says generative AI has answered “definitively.” Agility is LLM-agnostic, using models like Claude and Gemini to interpret instructions, and treats its industrial safety certification plus its data lake of real-world robot operations — possibly the largest in the industry — as its proprietary edges. Johnson puts consumer home robots “10-plus years” out, because warehouses have fixed layouts while homes are chaotic. Against newer AI-driven rivals such as Figure, 1X, the Bot Company, and Sunday Robotics, and with over a million unfilled US warehouse jobs as the labor backdrop, Agility is betting on the loading dock, not the living room. Founded in 2015 by researchers who pioneered two-legged walking techniques, the company has spent a decade on the unglamorous parts of robotics — and that is exactly what it is selling.
Sources
AI-assisted summary compiled from the sources above, reviewed by a human before publishing.