Agility Robotics and Mercado Libre agree to deploy Digit in fulfilment operations

Mercado Libre and Agility Robotics have signed a commercial agreement to deploy Agility's Digit humanoid robot at Mercado Libre's fulfillment facility in San Antonio, Texas, with plans to explore additional use cases across Mercado Libre's warehouse network in Latin America. Digit will handle repetitive, physically demanding fulfilment tasks including tote movement; both companies plan to evaluate how humanoid automation can reduce labour gaps, improve ergonomic safety, and free workers for higher-value work.

Agility Robotics was founded in 2015 as a spinout of Oregon State University by Jonathan Hurst, Damion Shelton, and Mikhail Jones. Its roots stretch back to Hurst's PhD research at Carnegie Mellon University in the early 2000s, where he and Shelton met, and to the Dynamic Robotics Laboratory at Oregon State, which built ATRIAS and then Cassie between 2009 and 2016 under a DARPA grant. Cassie was a bipedal lower body with no torso, arms, or perception; it was designed to solve the locomotion problem and nothing else. It was sold as a research platform to labs and innovation departments from 2017, and went on to set the Guinness World Record for the 100-metre run by a bipedal robot.

Digit was introduced in 2019, building on Cassie's gait by adding a torso, arms, and perception systems. The first commercial test came in 2020, when Ford Motor Company trialled Digit for last-mile delivery, pairing it with early autonomous vehicles. That programme did not advance past the testing phase, and Agility drew a clear lesson from it: last-mile delivery required solving too many uncontrolled environmental variables simultaneously. By 2021, Agility had identified warehouse logistics as a nearer-term and structurally larger market, refocusing Digit around repetitive, ergonomically challenging bulk material handling tasks in existing facilities. The pivot was not incremental; it meant redesigning the commercial thesis entirely around a specific operational slot that Digit's human-scale form factor was already suited for.

Amazon's Industrial Innovation Fund joined a $150 million Series B in April 2022, alongside DCVC and Playground Global. The Amazon relationship became the proving ground. In 2023, Amazon began testing Digit in its warehouse operations, initially using the robot for tote recycling, and noted that Digit's size and shape were well suited for buildings designed for humans. That same year, Agility completed a proof-of-concept with GXO Logistics at a Spanx facility in Georgia, where Digit transferred totes from autonomous mobile robots to conveyor belts; the arrangement became the industry's first humanoid Robot-as-a-Service contract in 2024. Also in 2024, Schaeffler made a minority investment in Agility and committed to deploying Digit across its 100 plants worldwide by 2030; the deal was announced at Web Summit.

To support production at that scale, Agility opened RoboFab, a 70,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Salem, Oregon, designed to produce up to 10,000 Digit units per year; the company called it the world's first factory purpose-built for humanoid mass production. Funding has totalled an estimated $640 million, with a valuation of approximately $2.5 billion. By the time of the Mercado Libre announcement, Digit had moved over 100,000 totes in live commerce operations across its deployed customer base.

Mercado Libre is Latin America's largest e-commerce and fintech company, listed on Nasdaq and operating across 18 countries. It joins GXO, Schaeffler, and Amazon as named Digit customers. The San Antonio deployment is Agility's first customer with an explicit future expansion path outside the United States and Europe; the Latin America angle gives the deal different strategic weight from the prior logistics and automotive partnerships. The specific tasks beyond commerce fulfilment support have not been disclosed. The initial deployment is a single facility commercial agreement; expansion across Mercado Libre's Latin American warehouse network is described as future exploration, not a confirmed rollout.

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