Agility Robotics opens 60,000 sq. ft. facility in Tesla's backyard

Agility Robotics is opening a 60,000-square-foot facility to train its humanoid robots in Fremont, California, just up the highway from the factory where Tesla is expected to start manufacturing its Optimus robots this year. Tesla has increasingly bet on Optimus. Elon Musk recently said he expects it to be "the biggest product ever" once it's "useful outside of Tesla sometime next year." While Agility doesn't have Tesla's capital, it does have a robot, Digit, that is already useful in the real world.

The robot is already generating revenue, carrying totes and bins in manufacturing and warehouse settings for customers like Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada . The company says it has secured $300 million in contract orders for its robots. "It's great to have [Tesla] in the same area as us, because really, for a long time Agility was out there alone, and it's good to have others in the humanoid space," CEO Peggy Johnson told TechCrunch.

"We have commercialized. We now know what it takes to walk into these facilities and meet their safety bars, their regulatory bars, compliance, plug into their IT infrastructure, plug into their warehouse management system." Agility hasn't disclosed how many Digits that it has built or deployed, but outside observers estimate that dozens have worked in pilot or revenue-generating deployments. The company has said, for example, that Digits have moved 100,000 totes at a GXO logistics facility.

Johnson is currently leading Agility through a reverse-merger that is expected to make it the first pure-play humanoid robot company on the public markets later this year. Founded in 2015 by a group of researchers who developed new techniques that allow robots to safely walk on two legs, Agility is trying to capitalize on its lead over a newer generation of AI-inspired robotic startups like Figure, 1X, the Bot Company, or Sunday Robotics. While the arrival of transformer-based neural networks that helped give rise to LLMs also promises major advancements in robotic behavior, Agility is taking a practical approach to autonomy.

"When you think about self-driving cars, you know, as a non-humanoid example, you really don't want the anti-lock brake controller under AI control," Agility co-founder and chairman Damion Shelton told TechCrunch. "The analog with humanoids is all the safety stuff needs to go through a path that's not generative AI, right? You don't want to get creative with your safety stack." What AI does do, however, is deliver on the promise of scale.