Agility Robotics has a new hub in Silicon Valley, where it will be luring 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 cofounder and chief robot officer, told Business Insider his company has no interest in joining the escalating competition over pay packages for top AI and robotics talent.
“One of the things that’s been weird recently has been kind of the bidding wars 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 existing and new employees across hardware engineering, AI and machine learning, and customer operations support.
The site will serve as a “robot school” to teach Agility’s Digit humanoid new skills, Hurst said.
The Fremont location, about 15 miles east of Palo Alto, gives Agility a closer proximity to one of the world’s deepest pools of technical talent. It also means Agility will be near some of the most well-funded companies competing in the robotics space.
On the other side of the road is Meta’s own Fremont campus, which houses the company’s hardware R&D team, including its robotics outfit. 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, at times leading to eye-popping compensation packages. At Meta, top hires have been offered nine-figure signing bonuses. Other AI leaders at smaller outfits can see between $300,000 and $400,000 in base pay, Business Insider previously reported.
Hurst said he has seen candidates offered what Agility believes is a fair, market-rate offer, only for the prospective hire to come back and say they’ve received double from another company.
“We’re like, ‘Go for it.’ That’s okay,” Hurst said, adding that the startup prefers candidates who fit Agility’s culture and mission.
To lure top talent, Hurst points to his company’s progress: “We’re the first to commercially deploy humanoid robots.”
Agility is one of the few robotics startups in the US with humanoids performing sustained work beyond the confines of a research lab.
The company first deployed Digit, a bipedal robot, for commercial operations in 2024. Agility has since deployed the bot across manufacturing, distribution, and logistics operations, accumulating more than 65,000 hours of work.
Digit’s primary tasks for now have been picking up bins and moving them to another location, Hurst said.
“We’re doing this in a serious way. The we-are-going-to-build-a-sustainable-growing-company way,” Hurst said. “It’s not so much a tell-a-grand-story-and-hope-we-can-fill-in-the-gaps way.”
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 conditional multiyear orders for its next-generation Digit V5.
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