Agility Welcomes Robotics Pioneer Melonee Wise as New CTO, Establishes New Chief Robot Officer Role, and Celebrates Year of Outstanding Leadership Growth
Just over a year ago in April of 2022, Agility announced a $150M Series B funding round. That investment propelled us to more than double our team size, land new multinational Fortune 100 customers, and successfully launch the latest version of Digit, the world’s first human-centric, multi-purpose robot made for logistics work, at Promat in March 2023.
Digit completed 20+ hours of live public demos at ProMat 2023.
But of all the highlights, perhaps the most significant is the strategic growth of our leadership team and the addition of game changing expertise that will take Agility through the next phase of our journey and set us up for long term success.
In the past year, we’ve added a CCO, CFO, and COO, and created the exciting new Chief Robot Officer (CRO) organization, led by Agility co-founder Jonathan Hurst. Today, we’re thrilled to cap off this incredible year of leadership growth by welcoming industry luminary and well-known roboticist Melonee Wise to the team as our new CTO.
Growing the leadership team
Melonee Wise, Chief Technology Officer
Our most recent addition to the Agility executive team, Melonee brings as much (or more) experience in building and deploying fleets of robots than just about anyone on the planet. Among many other accomplishments, Melonee is the recipient of the 2022 Engelberger Robotics Award, the world’s most prestigious robotics honor. Prior to joining Agility, Melonee was Vice President and General Manager of Robotics Automation for Zebra Technologies. In 2021, Zebra acquired Fetch Robotics, which Melonee co-founded, and for whom she served as CEO from the company’s formation in 2015.
As CEO of Fetch Robotics, Melonee moved the robotic automation industry forward, in many ways blazing the path for the work we will be doing at Agility over the next few years. Melonee will be a catalyst for our broader software and technology systems for deploying fleets of Digits in warehouses all over the country. She also brings a wealth of regulatory experience and will help establish safety policies for the benefit of the entire robotics industry.
Aindrea Campbell, Chief Operations Officer
With more than 20+ years as a senior operations leader at companies including Ford and Apple, Aindrea’s resume pretty much speaks for itself. Aindrea brings deep experience in transformation–including co-leading the transition from steel to aluminum on the F150 and rapidly scaling capacity as head of iPad operations during COVID. Aindrea joined Agility in January of 2023 and hit the ground running, aligning and improving our critical operations. Aindrea brings an expert vision for product development and manufacturing. With Aindrea’s guidance, we will continue rapidly scaling our manufacturing and corporate operations to meet the large commercial demand for Digit.
Renuka Ayer, Chief Financial Officer
Talk about a win! Renuka joined our team in September of 2022. She has had a long and storied career as CFO, CEO, and Finance and Strategic leadership positions at public and private companies like Glowforge, Pulse Electronics, Dover, Ford just to name a few, and a strong track record of taking companies from startup to growth stage and beyond. She instantly transformed Agility into a more robust and mature company, ensuring that we make the right financial decisions to secure a long and profitable future. Nothing like navigating a historic banking collapse and adjusting to a rapidly changing economic landscape during your first six months on the job!
Rich Bohne, Chief Commercial Officer
Rich joined Agility in June of 2022 bringing 30 years of sales, leadership, and commercial growth experience, most recently as Chief Revenue Officer at Fetch Robotics where he led the global sales team prior to the successful acquisition by Zebra Technologies. Rich is the champion of our commercial partnerships and with his expertise, we have already launched the Agility Partner Program and attracted multiple new Fortune 100 customers.
Ensuring Fast Innovation While Maturing the Product
Another significant update to Agility’s organizational structure is the development of the new Chief Robot Officer (CRO) organization led by co-founder Jonathan Hurst, whose groundbreaking bipedal locomotion research is the basis on which the company was created.
Jonathan’s passion has always been in research, innovation, and setting the vision for how our robots should look, move, function, and interact with the world. As such, in April 2023, he transitioned his title from CTO to CRO, to more closely match with his day-to-day work: setting Agility’s research & development roadmap, cultivating the innovation pipeline, shepherding Digit’s industrial design, and nurturing our overall brand identity. This change also allowed Agility to open a new CTO role focused on system-of-robot, the broader software product, and fleet deployment technologies, ultimately paving the way for Melonee Wise to join.
If there was ever somebody with the title of Chief Robot Officer,
how could it be anyone else?
With the creation of the CRO org comes the solidification of two departments: the new Innovation Department and the expanded Communications, Brand, and Marketing Department, and two more exciting additions to Agility's leadership team:
Pras Velagapudi, VP of Innovation and Distinguished Engineer
The new Innovation Department will be home to Agility’s tech strategy and R&D work. In many ways, this highlights a new era for Agility. As an early-stage robotics startup, the whole company was effectively the innovation department. Closing in on nearly a decade later, we are scaling out of startup land and that means intentionally dividing our innovation pipeline from our core manufacturing and engineering activities.
Pras joined Agility earlier in May 2023, and is almost uniquely qualified for this role, with decades of experience in robotics planning & control, creating and deploying robots into home, industrial, and outdoor environments around the world. He most recently was a VP of Engineering and Chief Architect at Berkshire Grey, applying fleets of hundreds of robots to logistics applications. In a landscape constantly disrupted by new technology, Pras will keep us focused on pragmatic product-relevant innovations, driven by the vision and strategy for Digit, operationalizing our R&D efforts and continually exploring what’s new.
Liz Clinkenbeard, VP of Communications
Since joining the company in December 2022, Liz owns Agility’s public image, storytelling, and brand, working closely with Jonathan to establish Digit’s persona and design, and to share Agility's vision of enabling humans to be more human with the world. She has a long and distinguished career in tech, leading comms at GitHub, managing some of the largest brands in tech at The OutCast Agency, and most recently co-founding and successfully growing Chatterbug, an online language-learning startup. Liz has the creative vision and expertise to position Agility as one of the world's most well-known, innovative, and respected robotics brands.
The Future is Bright and Full of Robots
With Rich, Renuka, Liz, Aindrea, Pras, and Melonee joining Jonathan, CEO and co-founder Damion Shelton, VP of Software and co-founder Mikhail Jones, VP of Customer Operations Mike Norrell, and VP of Hardware Brian Lange on the executive leadership team, we have the right people in place to lead Agility through its next phase of growth: producing the world’s first commercially available bipedal robot at scale and deploying fleets of Digits into logistics and warehouse operations all over the country and the world. We couldn’t be more excited about what’s to come!
Hat tip to Playground Global, DCVC, MFV Partners, ITIC, Robotics Hub, Safar Partners, Sony Innovation Fund, and TDK Ventures! We were also one of the inaugural companies in Amazon’s Industrial Innovation fund.
