Agility Robotics is opening a 60,000-square-foot facility to train its humanoid robots in Fremont, California, just down the road from the factory where Tesla is expected to begin manufacturing its Optimus robots this year.

Tesla has increasingly bet on Optimus. Elon Musk recently said he hopes it will be “the biggest product ever created” once it is “useful outside of Tesla sometime next year.”

While Agility doesn’t have the capital of Tesla, it does have a robot, Digit, that is already useful in the real world. The robot is already generating revenue, transporting bins and bins in manufacturing and warehouse environments for customers such as 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 on its own, and it’s good to have others in the humanoid space,” CEO Peggy Johnson told TechCrunch. “We’ve commercialized. “Now we know what it takes to get into these facilities and meet their security standards, their regulatory standards, compliance, connect to their IT infrastructure, connect to their warehouse management system.”

Agility has not disclosed how many Digits it has built or deployed, but outside observers estimate dozens have worked on pilot or revenue-generating deployments. The company claims, for example, that Digits has moved 100,000 containers at a GXO logistics facility.

Johnson is currently leading Agility through a reverse merger that is expected to make it the first humanoid robot company exclusively on the public markets later this year. Founded in 2015 by a group of researchers who developed new techniques that allow robots to walk safely on two legs, Agility is trying to capitalize on its lead over a new generation of AI-inspired robotics startups such as Figure, 1X, The Bot Company or Sunday Robotics.

While the advent of transformer-based neural networks that helped give rise to LLMs also promises major advances in robotic behavior, Agility is taking a hands-on approach to autonomy.

“When you think about self-driving cars, you know, as a non-humanoid example, you don’t really want the anti-lock brake controller to be under AI control,” Agility co-founder and president Damion Shelton told TechCrunch. “The analog with humanoids is that all you need for security is to go down a path other than generative AI, right? You don’t want to get creative with your security stack.”

What AI does do, however, is deliver on the promise of scale.

“One of the first times [Bruce Leak, the Quicktime inventor who serves on Agility’s board] When we were asked how we were going to code applications for the robot, we didn’t really have a good answer,” Shelton said. “The number of things you can imagine a robot doing is far greater than the number of engineers who can program robots. And generative AI definitively answers that question.”

The new facility is designed to accelerate the company’s robotic deployments. Johnson says more than 30 customers are in talks with the company about deploying Digit, and that the new facility will be where the six-foot-tall robot will learn new skills in environments similar to what it will experience in the field.

Unlike many of the new entrants into the humanoid space, Agility does not plan to offer humanoid robots in the home anytime soon. It’s a view that resonates with most independent robotics experts, who believe that today’s most powerful robots are not safe enough for consumer use. Digit operates in a human-free space right now, but version 5, expected to be released this fall, will have the ability to detect humans and will not need to be kept in a robot-only zone.

Co-founder and chief robot officer Jonathan Hurst said there is a lot of work to keep Agility busy with just manufacturing and logistics.

“Let’s start with the bins and containers, and then collect and prepare the equipment,” Hurst told TechCrunch. “And then let’s start working with cardboard, which is very difficult, and loading and unloading tractor trailers and things like that. Well, now we have 100 million robots, you know? A trillion-dollar company.”