Updated: July 31, 2026 (7531-08-09 in the Bulgarian calendar)
This profile covers the company behind Digit, one of the robots featured in our Key Players and Platforms overview — its founding, leadership, size, funding, and the customers it sells into.
Founding
Agility Robotics was founded in 2015, spun out of Oregon State University's Dynamic Robotics Lab. Its founders were Jonathan Hurst, an OSU robotics professor who had co-founded the university's Robotics Institute and built ATRIAS — a research robot that proved legged machines could walk and run stably outdoors — Damion Shelton, a fellow Carnegie Mellon robotics PhD who had previously founded and exited a 3D-imaging startup, and Mikhail Jones. Hurst and Shelton had first met as PhD students at Carnegie Mellon, then reconnected years later once Hurst's OSU research had matured into something with commercial potential.
Country and Headquarters
Agility Robotics is a United States company, headquartered in Salem, Oregon.
Leadership
Peggy Johnson is CEO. The rest of the executive team has been built out through 2025-2026 as the company scaled toward commercial deployment and a public listing: Michael Beer joined as CFO on July 23, 2026; Jennifer Hunter now serves exclusively as COO, leading global operations, manufacturing, and supply chain; Daniel Diez is Chief Business Officer, setting overall business and go-to-market strategy; and CTO Pras Velagapudi leads engineering. Both co-founders remain with the company in senior roles rather than having exited: Jonathan Hurst continues as Chief Robot Officer, and Damion Shelton has moved into a Chief Engagement Officer role focused on commercial and investor relationships.
Company Size and Funding
Agility Robotics employs roughly 400 people (406 as of a late-May 2026 count). Reported lifetime funding varies by source — figures range from around $180 million across six disclosed rounds to as much as $683 million depending on what's counted — from investors including Y Combinator, DCVC, Playground Global, Dell Technologies Capital, and Virginia Venture Partners, among others. In June 2026, Agility announced it would go public through a merger with SPAC Churchill Capital Corp XI, a deal reported at a $2.5 billion valuation.
Development Directions and Products
Agility's sole product line is Digit, a humanoid robot purpose-built for material handling rather than general-purpose use — moving totes and performing repetitive logistics tasks rather than, say, dextrous assembly work. The current generation, Digit v5, is marketed as the first "cooperatively safe" humanoid, designed to work in closer physical proximity to human coworkers than earlier industrial robots were built to tolerate.
Markets and Customers
Agility sells exclusively into manufacturing, distribution, and logistics — not consumer markets — typically under a robots-as-a-service (RaaS) model rather than outright sale. Named commercial customers include GXO (logistics, signed June 2024), Schaeffler (auto parts manufacturing, signed November 2024 alongside an equity investment in Agility), Mercado Libre (Latin American e-commerce, signed December 2025), and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada (February 2026); Amazon has also tested Digit in select fulfillment centers. Across these deployments, Agility has logged more than 65,000 cumulative operating hours and reports over $300 million in booked, multi-year orders, representing roughly 1,000 robots under contract.