Salem, Ore.-based Agility Robotics, whose two-legged Digit robots have been tested inside Amazon warehouses, is set to become the first publicly traded U.S. company dedicated solely to humanoid robots, beating its Silicon Valley and East Coast rivals to Wall Street.
The company, led by former Microsoft and Magic Leap executive Peggy Johnson, is going public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC — remember those? — named Churchill Capital Corp XI, created by financier Michael Klein.
Digit is a two-legged robot, about 5-foot-9, built to work in facilities designed for people. It lifts up to 35 pounds and handles repetitive tasks like moving totes and tending machines for up to 20 hours a day. The upcoming Digit v5 adds swappable hands, a 50-pound lifting capacity, and safety systems meant to let it work alongside people without barriers.
“What this will do is help us accelerate the customer engagements that we have right now — a long list of customers who are seeking to fill their labor shortages,” Johnson said on CNBC.
Financial details: The merger values Agility at $2.5 billion and is expected to provide more than $620 million in cash to fund its growth. That includes about $420 million Churchill raised from public investors and roughly $200 million from a group led by manufacturing giant Foxconn.
Initial filings released in connection with the deal do not disclose Agility’s revenue, and indicate that the company remains unprofitable. Its operating expenses rose to about $111 million in 2025 from $71 million the year before, and it burned through roughly $100 million in cash, according to figures Agility describes as preliminary and unaudited.
The filings cite more than $300 million in “committed” multi-year orders for the next-generation Digit v5. But the fine print acknowledges that the figure “is not a measure of current period revenue,” that it depends on the company hitting certain milestones, and that it comes from a three-year contract for 1,000 robots, placed by a customer whose identity isn’t disclosed.
Agility has raised more than $390 million in equity since its 2015 founding, according to its investor presentation made public Wednesday in conjunction with the deal.
A more detailed financial disclosure, including revenue and profit, typically comes later in the SPAC process with a filing known as a Form S-4. Agility is expected to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker “AGLT” once the deal closes, which the companies expect by the end of 2026.
Active deployments: Agility says Digit is currently being used by customers including auto-parts giant Schaeffler, logistics provider GXO, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada and Latin American e-commerce giant Mercado Libre, with more than 65,000 hours of real-world operation overall.
Amazon, an early Agility investor, has run multiple pilots of Digit, including one we observed in 2023 at an Amazon warehouse in Sumner, Wash., south of Seattle.
Asked if Amazon is an active Digit customer, an Agility spokesperson said Wednesday morning, “We have been actively engaged with Amazon since their investment in 2023 and have completed multiple pilots with them. We are looking forward to working with them again once we launch the next generation of our robot, which will be the first cooperatively safe humanoid.”
Agility is beating a field of better-funded rivals to the public markets, including Silicon Valley’s Figure AI, valued at $39 billion after raising more than $1 billion last year, and Massachusetts-based Boston Dynamics, the Hyundai-owned maker of the Atlas humanoid.
Elon Musk’s Tesla is also developing its Optimus robot, but inside an already-public company, not as a pure-play humanoid robotics company.
The company this week became the first to adopt NVIDIA’s newly announced Halos safety system for robotics, which is part of the company’s push to deploy humanoid robots that can work alongside people without safety barriers.
Agility is currently #5 on the GeekWire 200, our ranking of the Pacific Northwest’s top privately held tech startups. It will graduate from the list when it officially goes public.
https://ift.tt/7WvuO6C June 24, 2026 at 02:40PM GeekWire
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