This Silicon Valley City Is Quietly Becoming the New Robot Row | Invesloan.com

On a Thursday afternoon, about 70 people gathered around a nearly six-foot-tall humanoid robot outside an unassuming office building.

Employees, executives, and board members of Agility Robotics, along with local officials, had come to christen the humanoid startup’s new engineering hub: a 60,000-square-foot facility where nearly 200 existing and new employees will work on the AI and skills for its Digit bipedal robot.

The ribbon-cutting didn’t take place in San Francisco, Palo Alto, or San Jose, where some leading robotics companies have decided to cluster. Agility chose Fremont — an East Bay city better known for its industrial parks than for Silicon Valley startup mythology — to plant its new center.

Agility is the latest robotics startup to have a foothold in the area. Over the past 15 years, Fremont has seen companies tied to robotics or autonomous vehicles set up shop in the city.

Tesla, Meta, Zoox, Pony.ai, and DoorDash are among the big-name players that have established a footprint in Fremont to support their robotics ambitions.

At Agility’s new facility, engineers will teach Digit new tasks and improve the skills it already has.

“This is going to be the robot school,” Jonathan Hurst, Agility’s cofounder and chief robot officer, told Business Insider. “This is where we teach robot skills. It’s really going to be centered here.”

The hardware side of Silicon Valley

Fremont’s rise as a robotics center builds on an industrial history that Mayor Raj Salwan said the city deliberately preserved.

For more than 25 years, the city was home to New United Motor Manufacturing, or NUMMI, a joint venture between General Motors and Toyota. When the plant shut down in 2010, other cities might have converted the site into office space or housing.

Salwan said the city chose another direction.

“We doubled down on industrial,” the mayor told Business Insider. “We preserved our industrial land, and we said we’re all in on manufacturing.”

Tesla acquired the NUMMI plant that year, preserving Fremont’s automotive ties and attracting a network of suppliers. Meanwhile, the city courted other industries, such as semiconductor, biotech, and advanced manufacturing companies, Salwan said.

Now, the manufacturing base is supporting Fremont’s latest transition.

Robotics companies need some of the same things that have attracted earlier hardware businesses to the East Bay city, namely large buildings, production expertise, and enough open floor space for machines to move around.

The city tried to make it easier to open such large facilities. Salwan said Fremont streamlined regulations, developed in-house expertise, and changed some zoning rules to allow qualifying projects to move forward without lengthy hearings.

“We tell you everything up front, and then we help fast-track the process,” Salwan said. “If you want to build things, Fremont is the place.”

The lab meets the factory floor

Large floor space is only half the equation for robotics companies. They also need talent.

Fremont doesn’t exactly sit in the heart of the research and venture capital ecosystem found near Stanford University and Sand Hill Road. But it’s close enough to tap into the same pool of engineers, investors, and business partners.

The city is roughly 15 miles east of Palo Alto, across the Dumbarton Bridge. The proximity keeps companies like DoorDash and Zoox close to the talent, their headquarters, and their manufacturing hubs throughout the Bay Area.

DoorDash, which is headquartered in San Francisco, designs and builds its delivery bot, Dot, in Fremont through a partnership with Sonic Manufacturing. The partnership allows engineers from DoorDash Labs, the company’s robotics arm, to work “shoulder-to-shoulder” with Sonic employees, a DoorDash spokesperson said.

“In some situations, going from designing the line to rolling out our first robot could take months or even years,” the spokesperson said. “Thanks to the collaboration between the team working at Sonic and our Labs facilities, it only took a matter of weeks.”

Anyware Robotics, a small startup founded in 2023 that builds mobile warehouse robots, fits its entire operation inside one 11,000 square-foot Fremont facility.

Torsten Schreiber, Anyware cofounder and VP of go-to-market and product, said everything from software development to robot testing happens in the same building, allowing the startup to iterate quickly.

“Fremont sits at the intersection of Silicon Valley software talent and the East Bay’s hardware and manufacturing,” he said. “It’s a combination that is hard to find anywhere else.”

Schreiber said the location also puts his company near its customers’ warehouses and distribution operations.

Zoox, Amazon’s robotaxi venture, also planted its manufacturing operations in Fremont and the neighboring city of Hayward. Its Fremont site retrofits test vehicles and configures sensor pods, while the Hayward facility assembles the purpose-built robotaxi.

Zoox said the locations are close enough to its headquarters in Foster City to allow daily collaboration between the engineering and manufacturing teams. A Zoox spokesperson said the company is hiring for several positions supporting the two sites.

Physical AI needs physical space

In 2022, Meta expanded operations not far from its Menlo Park headquarters with a Fremont campus. Today, that campus is heavily focused on hardware research and development, particularly robotics and virtual- and augmented-reality devices, a Meta spokesperson said.

Across the street is Agility’s new hub.

Fremont is not about to replace San Francisco or the Peninsula as the Bay Area’s startup and venture capital centers. Instead, the city’s role has proven to be more physical, enabling companies to expand their robotics ambitions and place engineers near the factory floor.

Tesla earlier this year said its first large-scale Optimus humanoid production line would replace the Model S and Model X lines at its Fremont plant.

Agility, meanwhile, will continue to manufacture its Digit humanoid in Salem, where the startup is headquartered, while expanding its engineering pool in the Bay Area, Hurst, the cofounder, said.

In Fremont, Digit will undergo extensive testing as engineers teach the humanoid new skills.

As the robotics race heats up, investors are hungry to see robots work beyond a demo video. Hurst said that Agility’s new Fremont presence will also give customers and investors already passing through the Bay Area a chance to see Digit in action.

“It’s no longer acceptable to show just a demo or a video of a robot doing a thing,” Hurst said, adding that the Fremont location saves visitors from making a trip to Agility’s Salem HQ.

“Having this here so people can swing through is really convenient.”