Agility Robotics

The robots that win won't be the ones doing backflips for a video. They'll be the ones showing up for a full shift, every day, without fail. That's the thesis at the center of a new DIGITIMES Asia interview with 🌱🤝🌍 Nicolas Sauvage, president of TDK Ventures (an early investor in Agility). Sauvage argues that "generality is a destination, not a launch strategy," and that the robotics companies actually winning today are the ones with the narrowest operational discipline — not the broadest promises. Read the full interview for Sauvage's take on why focus, not hype, wins in physical AI. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/esPMqTdx #Agility #DigitRobot

I read this in Forbes this week, and it's more than worth the five minute read: Jeff Burnstein, who's spent four decades at the A3 - Association for Advancing Automation, was asked point blank whether humanoid robots are the future of factories or just another hype cycle. His answer: we're heavy in the hype cycle. And the only humanoid he's aware of that actually operated in a U.S. production facility is Agility Robotics' Digit, at a GXO Logistics plant. Digit is also on the floor at a Schaeffler manufacturing facility. We've logged more than 65,000 hours of operation. I appreciated that call out but I'd add one more thing about the hype cycle... Most demo videos aren't lying about what a robot can do...once. They're just not telling you about the hard part. Turning a demo into a safe, revenue-generating deployment is a completely different problem. We built Digit around solving for the hard part, not the demo. It doesn't always make for a great video. It does make for a great business. Burnstein's own data backs this up in a way that gets missed constantly: robot sales and U.S. unemployment move in opposite directions, not the same one. The real threat was never automation; it's losing the ability to compete at all. He's also right that safety, not intelligence or dexterity, is the actual bottleneck. No humanoid has shipped yet that can work safely outside a cage. Until that changes industry-wide, "scale" stays a slide in a pitch deck. Burnstein pegs today's unfilled manufacturing jobs at 500,000 and projects that number to reach 1.9 million by 2033. That gap gets closed by whoever can actually deploy safely outside of a cage, not by whoever has the best demo. Worth the read: https://lnkd.in/gr_p_eV8 #FutureOfWork

Why put a roboticist on stage at an energy conference? Because the labor shortage runs through all of it. Supply chains, construction velocity, and the skilled trades. At the Energy Future Forum 2026 in May, our co-founder and board chairman Damion Shelton sat down with Mark P Mills to make the case: in US warehouses alone, roughly 1 million manual-labor jobs sit unfilled, work that needs a person, with no person to do it. That's the gap Digit is built to close. Not science fiction, a real robot doing real work in a commercial warehouse today. And here's the distinction that matters: Digit takes on tasks, not jobs. It handles the repetitive work people don't want so they can move to safer, higher-skilled, better-paid roles. Damion and Mark also get into what changed to make this possible, why we're not building robot butlers, and why keeping people safe matters more than how fast we scale. Watch the full interview: https://lnkd.in/eYMe9Tbm #Agility #DigitRobot #FutureOfWork

At Agility, rigorous testing leads to exacting results — and the robots that prove it are already deployed in production facilities. We're hiring a Senior Hardware Test Engineer to own design verification for the electrical systems at the core of our humanoid robots: PCBAs, battery systems, power electronics, and advanced sensors including cameras and lidar. What you'll do: build and execute verification strategies for our Torso electrical subsystems, develop automated test infrastructure, lead root cause investigations, and raise the bar on engineering rigor across the team. Hybrid in Fremont, CA. Apply via the link in the comments. #Agility #FutureOfWork

This is a must-listen for safety engineers, standards professionals, and anyone working toward humanoid deployment at scale. Kevin R., our Distinguished Robotics Safety Engineer, joined Erik Reynolds on "Safety Third: Autonomous Revolution" to unpack a deceptively hard question: how do you safely stop a robot that may fall when it stops? Kevin leads ISO 25785-1 as Project Leader — the first safety standard for dynamically stable industrial mobile robots — and shares what nine customer deployments and more than 65,000 hours of real-world operation have taught us that lab testing alone cannot. #Agility #Humanoids #FunctionalSafety

Today, some humanoid components are still sourced internationally, a reflection of current limits in American manufacturing capacity, not a matter of preference. Closing that gap is a strategic opportunity: strengthen domestic production, reduce long-term reliance on foreign suppliers, and build resilience into a critical emerging industry, much as Congress has begun to do in semiconductors. Watch our CEO Peggy Johnson's full perspective: https://lnkd.in/e-qnU5wC #Agility #FutureOfWork

"We have commercialized." — Peggy Johnson, Agility CEO. One line in TechCrunch that captures why Fremont matters: AI scales what Digit can do. Safety is engineered, never improvised. That's what turns a robot into a coworker. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eDsztxTx Thank you, Tim Fernholz. #PhysicalAI #FutureOfWork #HumanoidRobots

Agility has landed in Silicon Valley! More to come.

Yesterday we opened our new Fremont, California facility — a 60,000-square-foot hub in the heart of Silicon Valley, where our teams train, test, and advance both the physical AI that teaches Digit new skills and the hardware behind future robots. Fremont puts us next to the world's deepest AI talent and lets us develop new capabilities faster, then get them working in real customer operations. It complements RoboFab, our manufacturing facility and headquarters in Salem, Oregon. Together, the two sites cover the full range of engineering behind Digit, from AI to hardware. We're hiring nearly 200 people across AI/ML software, hardware engineering, and field operations to lead it. The demand is real: active deployments with Schaeffler, GXO, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, and Mercado Libre, plus more than $300 million in orders for Digit V5. Agility is one of the only companies operationally deploying humanoids in real enterprise environments — and Fremont is how we stay there. Explore open roles → https://lnkd.in/gXb-MRhn Read more at the link in comments. #PhysicalAI #FutureOfWork #HumanoidRobots