Agility Robotics — Digit, the bipedal humanoid built for warehouse work

• 2015
  Founded
• Salem, OR
  Headquarters
• Digit
  Flagship platform
• ~$640M
  Funding raised
• USA
  Country
• Private
  Status

About Agility Robotics

Agility Robotics was founded in 2015 as a spin-out of the Dynamic Robotics Laboratory at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon. Co-founders Jonathan Hurst (a professor of legged robotics who developed the OSU Cassie research platform) and Damion Shelton commercialized more than a decade of academic work on dynamic bipedal locomotion. Shelton served as CEO from founding through March 2024, when veteran technology executive Peggy Johnson — previously executive vice president of business development at Microsoft and CEO of Magic Leap — became CEO to lead the company's transition from pilot-stage engagements to commercial-scale operations. Hurst continues as Chief Technology Officer and Chief Robot Officer, and Shelton transitioned to President.

The company's flagship product is Digit, a human-sized bipedal robot with a distinctive reverse-knee "ostrich-style" leg architecture. Rather than pursue a fully anthropomorphic five-fingered general-purpose robot, Agility made an early and deliberate bet on warehouse logistics as the first commercially viable domain for humanoids: repetitive tote and box handling in facilities already designed for people, with clear economic value, measurable throughput, and no facility retrofits required. That focus has produced one of the most-deployed commercial humanoid platforms in the industry.

Agility's operational milestones have moved quickly. In late 2023 the company opened RoboFab, a 70,000-square-foot Digit manufacturing facility in Salem, Oregon — one of the first purpose-built humanoid robot factories in the world, with a stated capacity target of more than 10,000 units per year. Amazon announced Digit testing in its fulfillment operations in October 2023, and expanded evaluation through 2024 and 2025. In 2024 Agility and GXO Logistics announced what was widely reported as the first commercial Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) contract for a humanoid robot, putting Digit on paying, multi-shift duty at a Spanx distribution center operated by GXO in Georgia.

On the funding side, Agility has raised approximately $640 million in private capital across multiple rounds. A $150 million Series B closed in April 2022 led by DCVC and Playground Global, with participation from Amazon's Industrial Innovation Fund; a $400 million Series C closed in early 2025 with SoftBank participation, valuing the company at approximately $2.1 billion post-money. Direct competitors in the current general-purpose humanoid robot AI boom include Figure AI, Tesla Optimus, 1X Technologies, Apptronik, Boston Dynamics (Atlas), and a rapidly expanding field of well-funded entrants pursuing similar warehouse, manufacturing, and logistics use cases.

Technology stack

Agility's technology stack reflects the company's academic origins in dynamic locomotion and its commercial focus on structured warehouse environments. Rather than pitching a single end-to-end general-purpose AI model, Agility emphasizes rugged bipedal mechatronics, a production-oriented control stack, and cloud-based fleet orchestration purpose-built for logistics workflows.

Perception

Digit uses a multi-sensor perception suite for 360-degree situational awareness in a warehouse setting: four Intel RealSense depth cameras, LiDAR, and a MEMS IMU for inertial reference. This sensor mix is well suited to structured-but-cluttered environments — aisles, conveyors, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), stationary shelving — where the robot must localize precisely, avoid dynamic obstacles, and detect human co-workers.

Locomotion, control, and the Agility Arc platform

Digit's reverse-knee bipedal leg design is the direct commercial evolution of the OSU Cassie research platform. It gives Digit an efficient, springy gait that can traverse stairs, curbs, inclines, and uneven floors — capabilities that matter in real distribution centers rather than choreographed demo stages. On top of the low-level control stack, Agility runs Agility Arc, a cloud-based fleet-management platform that dispatches tasks, integrates with Warehouse Management Systems (WMS), Warehouse Execution Systems (WES), and third-party AMRs (including MiR and Zebra fleets), and provides remote observability across multi-robot deployments.

Actuators, power, and compute

Digit is fully electric, using brushless DC (BLDC) actuators at 16 actuated joints across the legs, torso, and 4-DoF arms — no hydraulics — which simplifies serviceability and delivers a quieter, cleaner platform for indoor facilities. The 3.0 kWh lithium-ion battery pack (nominal 51.1 V, 59 Ah) provides approximately four hours of runtime and recharges in about two hours via an autonomous docking station, enabling continuous multi-shift operation with battery-swap or self-charging cycles.

Power management is one of the most demanding subsystems on a platform like Digit. Each joint's servo controller must deliver hundreds of watts of instantaneous torque without thermally throttling, which drives the use of high-efficiency wide-bandgap semiconductors (SiC and GaN) in the motor-driver output stages, tightly matched precision passives on every gate-drive and current-sense channel, and thousands of MLCC capacitors distributed across power and signal rails. The battery pack integrates cell balancing, thermal management, and multi-stage protection ICs whose reliability is often the practical ceiling on how long a humanoid platform can run between docking cycles.

The robotics supply chain — where Hybrid Electronics fits in

A modern humanoid robot is one of the most component-dense products ever built. A single Digit-class platform depends on thousands of individual electronic components: precision BLDC motor drivers, high-torque servo modules, IMUs and 6-DoF force-torque sensors, LiDAR and time-of-flight modules, GPU compute boards, battery-management ICs, wide-bandgap SiC/GaN power semiconductors, high-speed board-to-board connectors, precision resistors, and thousands of MLCC capacitors distributed across every power and signal rail.

Building that kind of hardware puts enormous pressure on the electronic-components supply chain. Prototype pilots and low-volume production runs frequently hit allocation, EOL notices, and long lead times on the exact parts they need, and R&D and field teams routinely have to support older platforms that use semiconductors no longer in mainstream distribution. During the current humanoid robotics and general-purpose robot AI boom, this pressure is amplified: dozens of well-funded teams are chasing the same short list of high-torque BLDC drivers, precision IMUs, GPU compute modules, and automotive-grade power semiconductors, and franchise stock on many key parts is now measured in months of lead time rather than weeks.

Hybrid Electronics has been sourcing electronic components for industrial and embedded systems since 1995. For robotics teams — humanoid, mobile, industrial, and research — we specialize in finding the parts you need when mainstream distribution can't:

Trademark and affiliation notice. Agility Robotics®, Digit, Cassie, and Agility Arc are trademarks of Agility Robotics, Inc. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or authorized by Agility Robotics, Inc. All information on this page is compiled from public sources for educational and reference purposes.