Digit, the flagship robot at Oregon-based Agility Robotics, raised its hand to wave at the audience at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech in Park City, Utah, as CEO Peggy Johnson explained to the crowd why the robot’s knees were, well, backward—like bird legs.
“Knees get in the way of picking things up,” she explained to Fortune tech reporter Jason Del Rey, pointing out that Digit was designed to work in big warehouses, lifting things up and putting things down.
Now, Digit is putting its backward-knees design, ten years in the making, to good use: The droid recently got hired at its first real job—picking up totes at a Spanx facility in Georgia and putting them onto conveyors. The work is part of a multi-year deal with logistics provider GXO Logistics, and Johnson said the company is already getting monthly revenue from the robot-as-a-service project.
Johnson, who has only been in the CEO role for four months, said that there are about 1.1 million unfilled warehouse jobs in the US that require the repetitive, mundane tasks Digit is doing. “Nobody wants these jobs,” she said, adding that repetitively lifting heavy weights leads to workers getting hurt, and ultimately quitting their warehouse jobs. “That’s where the injuries come in. That’s where the turnover comes in,” she said. Warehouse employees that used to do physical work are now becoming the managers of the robots, she added: “They need to be upskilled.”
Agility Robotics, which spun out of research at Oregon State University, raised $150 million in a Series B round in April 2022 as the company prepared to deploy Digit in logistics and warehouse environments. Now that Digit has been released into the wild of the warehouse, Johnson said the company is working on a rollout for its next generation of Digit to come in the fall. Thanks to a factory the company recently built in Salem, Oregon, the company will roll out hundreds of Digit robots, and thousands are planned for the following year—with an eye towards a goal of 10,000 to meet growing demand.
But it’s not just about getting the robots to walk—backward knees and all, Johnson emphasized. Instead, it’s about the robot being able to step into an operation’s existing workflow. “We need to enter a corporate IT infrastructure and make it work for them,” she said.
In April 2024, Agility Robotics confirmed that it laid off a “small number” of employees because of “ongoing efforts to structure the company for success” while ramping up production of Digit. Johnson said that the company is currently raising capital for another round of funding down the line.
But at the moment, she said, she is trying to figure out the best workplace for the handful of Digit robots currently available. “We have a lot of interest from automotive, retail grocers,” she said. “I’m trying to figure out which direction to go in.”
Correction: Agility Robotic’s $150 million funding was a Series B in 2022, not a series C in 2024. The GXO facility where Digit is working is in Georgia, not Connecticut.
