Peggy Johnson, the dealmaker selling humanoids before they pay off

Peggy Johnson

Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	1961
Occupation	Businessperson
Awards	Women in Technology Hall of Fame

The customer Agility Robotics cites most often is also its most candid critic. GXO Logistics rents Digit, the company’s two-legged robot, to lift plastic totes onto conveyor belts in a Georgia warehouse, and it has just agreed to put the machines into two more buildings. Its chief executive has also told analysts that humanoids have not yet earned back what they cost. Peggy Johnson, who runs Agility, does not argue the point. She talks about the order book instead, about pilots turning into contracts, and about the advantage of going first.

That gap, between a machine that works and a market still deciding whether to pay for it, is where Johnson has spent most of her working life. She is an electrical engineer whose first real talent turned out to be explaining technology to the people who might buy it, and the companies that hired her for that skill tended to need it most when the product was early or in trouble.

She grew up in Alhambra, east of Los Angeles, and earned her degree in electrical engineering at San Diego State University in 1985. Her first job was as an engineer in General Electric’s military electronics division. She then joined Qualcomm, a young San Diego company built around CDMA, its own standard for digital mobile calls, and stayed for 24 years.

At Qualcomm she started as an engineer who travelled with the business teams to translate technical detail for customers, and crossed to the commercial side. She oversaw the development of Brew, a platform for downloading applications to phones that is counted among the first mobile app stores, years before Apple made the idea ordinary. She later ran Qualcomm Internet Services, sat on the executive committee and finished as executive vice president of Qualcomm Technologies and president of global market development, with Qualcomm Labs, the company’s incubator for new businesses, under her watch.

In 2014 Satya Nadella, six months into his tenure as Microsoft‘s chief executive, hired her as executive vice president of business development, reporting directly to him. Microsoft paid her a $7.8 million signing bonus. The job was the deal itself, in a market where Windows no longer set the terms. Her team was central to the $26.2 billion purchase of LinkedIn in 2016, and she launched the corporate venture fund that became M12. She also brokered a partnership with Backstage Capital to back founders who are women, LGBTQ or people of colour. When she left, Nadella told his executives that her “ability to connect people, drive consensus, and forge relationships has taught me a lot.”

She wanted to run a company, she told The New York Times, and in 2020 she chose the most exposed chief executive job in consumer technology. Magic Leap had raised about $3 billion on the promise of augmented reality glasses, shipped a first headset priced above $2,000 that sold poorly, and that spring laid off roughly 600 of its 1,900 staff as founder Rony Abovitz stepped aside. Johnson took over in August and turned the company away from consumers and toward business customers. A $500 million round the following year valued Magic Leap at about $2 billion, less than the money it had already raised.

Her three years there read two ways. The generous reading is a pivot carried out cleanly: Magic Leap 2 arrived in 2022 as a capable headset priced for companies rather than living rooms, and when Apple unveiled Vision Pro the next year Johnson called it validation rather than a threat. The stricter reading is a rescue that stopped short of its destination. When she handed the job to Ross Rosenberg in October 2023, TechCrunch noted that both of them had been given “a seemingly impossible role: making the extremely well-funded startup profitable.” Profit was not in her farewell statement. The distinction matters now, because Agility is asking public investors to make a similar bet on a faster clock.

Agility hired her in March 2024. The company began in 2015 as a spin-off from Oregon State University’s Dynamic Robotics Laboratory and is based in Salem, Oregon; co-founder Damion Shelton, its chief executive since the start, became president. Her brief was the part she has always done well: sales, industry partners, fundraising and getting robots delivered in numbers. Digit was already at work in GXO’s Spanx facility outside Atlanta under what the two companies call the first robots-as-a-service contract for a humanoid. Its backward-bending knees, sometimes called bird legs, let it reach from floor to overhead shelf without hitting the racking. Amazon, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, Schaeffler and Mercado Libre have since signed on, and Agility’s RoboFab plant in Salem is designed to build up to 10,000 robots a year.

This summer Agility agreed to go public by merging with Churchill Capital Corp XI, Michael Klein’s blank-check company, in a deal that values it at about $2.5 billion and is expected to raise more than $620 million, the largest sum yet raised in humanoid robotics. Johnson defends the route as a matter of timing: the first pure humanoid maker to list gets the attention. She points to more than $300 million in booked multi-year orders, a figure the company says depends on contractual milestones and is not current revenue, and she declines to give forward guidance or disclose what a Digit costs to build. In September Agility unveiled Digit 5, designed to work close to people, where today’s units operate behind fences. In October she joined Project Meridian, a study on the future of warfare led by MITRE and commissioned by the Pentagon, as an individual consultant.

Johnson sits on the boards of BlackRock and Fox Corporation. She is married with three children. She and her husband fund scholarships, research and an endowed professorship in San Diego State’s electrical and computer engineering department, which later gave her an honorary doctorate. Business Insider ranked her the most powerful female engineer in the United States in 2017, four years after Women in Technology International inducted her into its Hall of Fame.

The next test has a date. Churchill Capital’s shareholders vote on the merger on November 2, and if it closes Agility will trade on Nasdaq as AGLT. Digit 5 is due to reach its first customers in the first half of 2027 and general availability by the end of that year, which is when GXO plans to move its new sites onto it. By then the question that has followed Johnson from Brew to Magic Leap will carry a share price: whether the person who sells a technology before it pays can stay long enough to watch it pay.

Tags: business, ceos, microsoft, business leaders, Satya Nadella, Qualcomm, Agility Robotics, Digit, Peggy Johnson

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