Agility Robotics heads to public markets with working humanoids

Published: 2026-07-07T10:46:44.000Z

Agility Robotics is about to become the first pure-play humanoid robot company to trade on a public market, and it is doing so with an unusually grown-up pitch. Its SPAC merger values the firm at 2.5 billion dollars and is expected to raise more than 620 million dollars.

Agility Robotics is about to become the first pure-play humanoid robot company to trade on a public market, and it is doing so with an unusually grown-up pitch. The Oregon firm has agreed to go public by merging with Churchill Capital Corp XI, a blank-cheque vehicle sponsored by the dealmaker Michael Klein, in a transaction that values Agility at a pre-money 2.5 billion dollars and is expected to raise more than 620 million dollars. That figure, drawn partly from the shell company's trust and partly from a private placement led by the iPhone manufacturer Foxconn, would be the largest capital raise in the short history of humanoid robotics, and the combined company is set to list under the ticker AGLT once shareholders and regulators sign off later this year. What separates Agility from the crowd is that its robots already turn up for work. Its flagship machine, a bipedal humanoid called Digit that stands around five foot nine, is already moving totes and goods inside real warehouses and factories, having logged more than 65,000 operating hours across customer sites. The company reports over 300 million dollars in booked multi-year orders covering roughly a thousand robots, with a pipeline of more than 30 customers that includes Amazon, the logistics group GXO, Toyota's Canadian manufacturing arm and the Latin American retailer Mercado Libre. That is a strikingly concrete order book in a sector where most rivals are still selling promise. Chief executive Peggy Johnson, a former Microsoft executive, has been notably restrained about where all this leads. She insists robots in the home remain more than a decade away, comparing the messiness of domestic spaces unfavorably with the relative order of roads, and keeps the focus squarely on factories and warehouses where American labor shortages leave over a million jobs unfilled. That discipline is reflected in the price. At 2.5 billion dollars, Agility is valued far below better-funded rivals such as Figure AI, last pegged near 39 billion dollars, and Apptronik at 5.5 billion, a gap that reads as either a bargain or a warning depending on how quickly Digit can be built cheaply and deployed widely. The Gulf has a real stake in how this plays out. The region's logistics giants, from Dubai's DP World and Jebel Ali to Saudi operators racing to modernize under Vision 2030, are exactly the kind of high-throughput, labor-hungry environments Agility is chasing, and warehouse automation is climbing fast across the UAE and the wider Middle East. There is even a financial thread back to the region, since Agility counts SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 among its backers, a vehicle heavily funded by Gulf sovereign money. As homegrown ambitions in physical AI grow, and cheaper Chinese humanoids court the same buyers, the Middle East looks set to be a serious testing ground for working robots.