Damion Shelton
American entrepreneur; co-founder and chief executive of Agility Robotics.
Damion Shelton is an American entrepreneur and the co-founder and chief executive of Agility Robotics. Shelton co-founded the company in 2015 in Salem, Oregon, as a spinoff from academic bipedal locomotion research. Under his direction, Agility Robotics has developed the Cassie research platform and the commercial Digit humanoid, which is one of the earliest full-form humanoid platforms to reach sustained commercial deployment.
Role in humanoid robotics
Shelton has led Agility Robotics through a strategic focus that narrows the humanoid category to a specific commercial application: logistics and package handling. Under his direction, Agility Robotics has focused on refining Digit for this application rather than expanding into general-purpose or consumer segments, and has commercialized through a Robot-as-a-Service (RaaS) subscription model rather than through outright hardware sales. The RaaS commercial approach is distinctive in the 2026 humanoid market and reflects Shelton's strategic assessment of how enterprise customers acquire and operate humanoid platforms in logistics settings.
Notable Digit deployments under his leadership include pilots at Amazon fulfillment centers announced in 2023 and subsequent deployments at other logistics operators through 2025 and 2026.
Background
Shelton's academic background includes work at Carnegie Mellon University and his career has been closely associated with Oregon State University's Dynamic Robotics Laboratory, from which Agility Robotics was spun out. His work on commercial legged robotics before and during the founding of Agility Robotics established the technical foundations that produced Digit.