Agility Robotics has a new center in Silicon Valley, where it will attract more world-class engineers to join the humanoid maker. Just don’t expect the startup to get into a spending war for talent. Jonathan Hurst, Agility’s co-founder and chief robot officer, told Business Insider that his company has no interest in joining the growing
Agility Robotics has a new center in Silicon Valley, where it will attract more world-class engineers to join the humanoid maker. Just don’t expect the startup to get into a spending war for talent.
Jonathan Hurst, Agility’s co-founder and chief robot officer, told Business Insider that his company has no interest in joining the growing competition for pay packages for top AI and robotics talent.
“One of the things that’s been strange recently has been the bidding war for some of this really rare talent,” Hurst said. “We’re not going to do that because we don’t want coin-operated employees.”
On Thursday, Agility opened a 60,000-square-foot research and training facility in Fremont, where the company expects to house nearly 200 new and existing employees in hardware engineering, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and customer operations support.
The site will serve as a “robot school” to teach Agility’s new humanoid Digit skills, Hurst said.
Agility Robotics held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for its new facility in Fremont. Agility Robotics
Fremont’s location, about 15 miles east of Palo Alto, gives Agility greater proximity to one of the deepest pools of technical talent in the world. It also means Agility will be close to some of the best-funded companies competing in the robotics space.
Across the road is Meta’s Fremont campus, which houses the company’s hardware R&D team, including its robotics team. About 10 miles south is Tesla’s vast Fremont center, where the company is preparing for Optimus production. And across the Dumbarton Bridge in Palo Alto is a cluster of other robotics companies, including 1X, Mind Robotics and Serve Robotics.
Competition for top AI talent has been fierce, sometimes leading to surprising compensation packages. At Meta, top employees have been offered nine-figure signing bonuses. Other AI leaders at smaller companies can receive between $300,000 and $400,000 in base salary, Business Insider previously reported.
Hurst said he has seen candidates who have been offered what Agility believes is a fair market rate offer, only for the prospective employee to come back and say they have received twice as much from another company.
“We thought, ‘Go ahead.'” That’s fine,” Hurst said, adding that the startup prefers candidates who fit Agility’s culture and mission.
To attract top talent, Hurst highlights his company’s progress: “We are the first to commercially deploy humanoid robots.”
Agility is one of the few robotics startups in the US with humanoids doing sustained work beyond the confines of a research lab.
The company first deployed Digit, a bipedal robot, for commercial operations in 2024. Since then, Agility has deployed the robot in manufacturing, distribution and logistics operations, accumulating more than 65,000 work hours.
Digit’s main tasks for now have been picking up containers and moving them to another location, Hurst said.
“We’re doing this seriously. The way we’re going to build a sustainable growing company,” Hurst said. “It’s not so much a tell a great story and hope we can fill in the gaps.”
Agility plans to go public via a SPAC later this year. The startup said in an SEC filing that it has more than $300 million in multi-year conditional orders for its next-generation Digit V5.