Agility Robotics Goes Public: A New Era for Humanoid Automation

Market Entry and Strategy

Agility Robotics is transitioning to a publicly traded company through a reverse-merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). The move is expected to raise $465 million in new capital, providing the company with resources to expand its operations in the competitive humanoid robotics sector.

The company has maintained a focus on industrial utility rather than the viral marketing often seen with other robotics firms. CEO Peggy Johnson emphasized that the company prioritizes repetitive, manual labor tasks that are difficult to staff with human workers.

Founded in 2015 as a spin-out from Oregon State University, Agility has deployed its Digit robots across industrial settings for customers including Schaeffler, GXO, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, and Mercado Libre. These units are primarily utilized for moving heavy totes in logistics environments.

Financials and Future Growth

While Agility has established a presence in real-world facilities, its financial path remains challenging. The company reported $174,000 in revenue for the first half of 2026, largely from related parties, against a loss of $362 million. Future growth hinges on the upcoming Digit 5 model, for which the company reports $300 million in planned contracts from 30 customers.

Digit 5 is designed to operate safely alongside human workers, a significant shift from the isolated work cells required by previous iterations. The company plans to demonstrate prototypes at CES 2027, with wider availability expected by the end of that year.

Technical Challenges in AI

Despite progress, the industry faces hurdles in achieving complex manipulation. Agility leverages 65,000 hours of real operational data to train its systems, though the company acknowledges that generative AI techniques have yet to provide the level of dexterity required for a broader range of tasks.

The company's production facility has the capacity to manufacture 10,000 robots annually, though specific production targets for the new model remain undisclosed. Agility's long-term success will depend on its ability to meet performance metrics such as throughput, uptime, and placement accuracy, as well as its capacity to scale customer adoption.

Agility remains one of the few companies with significant field experience, positioning it to potentially define the standards for industrial humanoid deployment as the technology matures.

Johnson gave the example of a single person lifting a 50-pound object — an informal threshold some workplaces use to avoid injury. “Digit can do that over and over and over,” she said. “You don’t want to give a human that job. You want to give that to the robot.”

Agility faces two key questions: How quickly can it find new customers for Digit 5, and how quickly can it improve on the robot’s capabilities? Prospective customers need to spend $500,000 for Agility to do an on-site proof of concept before a deployment is fully scaled up; there were four customers signed up in May, 2026. And while Agility can pick up heavy loads and place them with 98% accuracy, it still — like most of today’s robots — lacks the ability to do complex manipulation tasks.

It’s still not clear how quickly generative AI techniques will unlock the kind of dexterity that could allow robots to handle a wide variety of items. Training systems based on video and teleoperation data have not led to reliable general autonomy, though adapting the transformer architecture to different modalities appears promising to physical AI researchers.

“There’s no internet of physical data of robot movements, and that’s why you see so many people trying to simulate the data using a variety of things, and we use all of those techniques as well,” Johnson said. “They have their pros and cons, but we also have … 65,000 hours of real operational data from real customers in real facilities…that helps us accelerate the training of Digit.”

Johnson said the capital raised in the SPAC transaction would meet the company’s current needs, but wouldn’t project that it would be sufficient for the company to be self-sustaining. She wouldn’t share production targets for Digit 5, but the company has said its production facility could produce 10,000 of the robots annually.

“What you’ll see from us going forward is continuing to listen to our customers, understanding what they need in these facilities,” she said. “We’re taking our cue from them because we’re building a business.”

For all the open questions, Agility still finds itself further ahead of most humanoid builders by dint of simply putting its product in the field.

“Let’s start with the bins and the totes, and then let’s do the picking and the kitting,” cofounder and CTO Johnathan Hurst told TechCrunch at the opening of the company’s Fremont R&D facility this summer. “And then let’s like start working on cardboard, which is really hard, and loading and unloading tractor trailers and things like that. Okay, now we’re at 100 million robots, you know? A trillion-dollar company.”