- General
- October 15, 2020
- 5 minutes read
Agility Robotics Lands $20M Round
Photo credit: Agility Robotics Agility Robotics, an Oregon-based robotics startup, has announced that it’s raised $20 million in new funding…
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Agility Robotics, an Oregon-based robotics startup, has announced that it’s raised $20 million in new funding co-led by DCVC and Playground Global, with participation from Sony, TDK Ventures, MFV Partners, and the Industrial Technology Investment Corporation (ITIC). The new funding brings the total amount of capital that Agility has raised since its inception to $29 million.
Agility says it’ll put the new funding towards meeting the demand for its legged robots from logistics providers and e-commerce retailers. The company’s main product is a humanoid robot named Digit that’s capable of basic tasks such as walking, stair climbing, and autonomous navigation. Thanks to improvised arms that can perform basic manipulation tasks, Digit is adopted by logistics providers and retailers to help handle the movement of goods and items within restricted areas. For example, Agility early this year reached a deal to sell robots to automaker Ford, which adopted them for home delivery trials (as demonstrated in the clip below).
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| Photo credit: Ford/Agility Robotics |
Agility unveiled the Digit robot last year after discontinuing its previous robot, Cassie, which was a bipedal robot used by customers for locomotive research work. Ford was the first customer for the Digit robot, receiving two of them in January of this year. A purchase of Agility’s robots comes with continued support from the company given it’s constantly working on the enhancement of its robots.
Agility as a company was spun off from the University of Oregon in 2015. Its origins can be traced back to the Ph.D. research work of its co-founder Jonathan Hurst at the Carnegie Mellon University in the early 2,000s. The company is based out of the city of Albany, Oregon and also maintains an additional office in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
