There was nothing like Digit at ProMat last year. The manufacturing supply chain event has gradually transformed into a technology exhibition in recent years. Many of the biggest names in the space were in attendance, showcasing autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), bin pick-up arms and automated storage and retrieval systems. But Agility’s small army of bipedal robots was all there was to talk about.
A year later, the conversation has changed. The idea of humanoid robots working in factories no longer seems like some distant fantasy. Sure, there’s validation in last week’s $675 million fundraiser from competitor Figure. Interest in humanoid robots is at an all-time high, and investors no longer consider it a pipe dream.
Videos taken at last March’s event were widely shared online, exposing Agility’s robot to its largest audience to date. The demonstrations captured something fundamental to the field of industrial robotics, as highly complex and technically impressive bots repeated the same boring activity over and over again—in this case, moving back and forth between a wall and the conveyor belt. According to Agility co-founder Damion Shelton, it was here that the then-CEO began exploring succession plans.
“When we went through ProMat last year, that was really the point where I said, ‘okay, the company is very different now than when we founded it,’” Shelton told TechCrunch. “This was really the first time we had publicly shown robotics doing work — but also, frankly, the first time anyone had shown a humanoid [robots] I’m working. So that was really the catalyst. We started a search process last August.”
Two months before the event, Agility brought in Apple/iPad vet Aindrea Campbell as COO to handle the company’s rapidly scaling production plans. Four months later, Shelton’s co-founder Jonathan Hurst stepped down from the CTO role, moving to head robotics focused on research. Melonee Wise — who had most recently worked at Zebra after it acquired AMR startup logistics company Fetch — replaced Hurst.
Toronto, Canada – May 21, 2019. Peggy Johnson, Executive Vice President, Business Development, Microsoft, on Center Stage during the first day of Collision 2019 at the Enercare Center in Toronto, Canada. (Photo by Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile via Getty Images)
This week, Agility named a Microsoft veteran Peggy Johnson its second CEO. With this, the company is, perhaps, unique among its peers in having female executives in five C-Suite roles. Unlike Wise, Johnson does not have the robotics background of her predecessor. However, it has a long history in the tech world. Her career began at mobile chip giant Qualcomm, where she would eventually spend a quarter of a century.
He spent the next half-dozen years at Microsoft, where he helped lead the HoloLens team—a gig he used to become CEO of Magic Leap. He spent three years there turning the well-funded but struggling augmented reality company around from consumer gaming to enterprise applications. As of this writing, the success of this particular effort remains a very open question.
After yesterday’s announcement, Johnson joined Shelton and me on a call. He had finished running the Tokyo marathon the day before, but we managed to find a chunk of time that aligned with all three time zones. Johnson reflected on the parallels and difference between Agility and her previous gig.
“What it looks like is a very exciting product and technology, with a need and demand for it,” he explained. “The difference is that Agility found product-market fit, which really appealed to me. Today, right now, Digit can provide ROI to customers. And they’re not trying to boil the ocean. They just focus on a handful of use cases where Digit can provide value.”
Perhaps the biggest difference between Agility and the growing army of humanoid robotics startups is its big beginning. The company was founded in 2015 as a spinoff of Hurst’s work on legged robotics at the University of Oregon. Digit made its public debut at CES four years later as part of a partnership with Ford. At the time, Agility saw last-mile delivery as the most logical fit in the market. That deal, however, did not bear fruit as the company turned to the burgeoning world of warehouse automation.
Image Credits: Mark Reinertson/The Photo Group / Flickr (opens in new window) under a CC BY 2.0 (opens in new window) permission.
The Oregon-based company currently employs more than 200 people. He won’t yet reveal the number of figures he’s shipped, noting only that he built about 60 units of an earlier version.
During our conversation, Shelton mentioned Digit’s ability to traverse rough terrain, adding, “I’d love to get back to things like last-mile delivery at some point.” For now, however, warehouse work is very much the focus of the robot. Specifically, the robot is capable of moving bags of various shapes and sizes around the floor. That’s exactly how the bot was developed during select Amazon pilots announced last year.
“It went really well,” Shelton said. “We’re excited to continue with them as a partner, but no major updates since last fall’s event.
Johnson said Digit’s ability to get the job done today was a big driver in her decision to lead the company after her first conversation with Shelton a little more than a month ago. “From the outside looking at Agility, I like their focus on the here and now,” he explained. “What can the robot do today to provide value? Obviously, there’s a roadmap ahead of us of features that incorporate AI elements, that incorporate hardware elements, that integrate software elements, but for today, at this point in time that they deliver value, they’re spot on. As [Shelton] said, there really is no one else doing what Agility is doing right now for customers today.”
The AI reference was, in part, a reference to work was recently introduced from the company using LLM to help Digit adapt to the ever-changing real world in front of it. Interest in the class has — no doubt — been a key driver of investor interest in the ways it could potentially impact the way robots learn and interact with the world.
While Agility doesn’t specifically want to raise right now, the company says the possibility is always on the table. “The data is out there,” Johnson says of Figure’s recent impressive $2.6 billion valuation. “All the boats are coming up with that kind of headlines and we’re definitely going to capitalize on that.”
Shelton is quick to note that Agility’s last valuation came with a fundraising round about three years ago.
