Humanoids Reach the Public Market: Agility Robotics Lists on Nasdaq as AGLT With 65,000 Robot-Hours, $1.8 Million of Revenue and a $2.5 Billion Valuation

On 4 November 2026 Agility Robotics announced that it had completed its merger with the blank-cheque company Churchill Capital Corp XI, and that the combined company’s shares and warrants are expected to begin trading on Nasdaq today, 5 November, under the tickers AGLT and AGLTW. Churchill XI’s shareholders had approved the deal two days earlier, on 2 November, with more than 84 per cent of votes cast in favour; the SPAC’s own stock rose nearly 14 per cent that day.

The companies describe the result as “the only U.S. publicly listed pure-play humanoid robotics company with proven, active commercial deployments”. The qualifier “U.S.” is doing real work in that sentence: UBTech has traded in Hong Kong since December 2023, when its Walker S humanoid carried the gong mallet onto the stage. But for the American market, and for anyone who wants to see what a humanoid business looks like with the books open, this is the first such company, and the filings behind the listing are more informative than any demo video published this year.

At the time of writing, before the U.S. open, there is no first-day price. This post is about what the documents say, not about the stock.

The deal, and what the redemptions say

The transaction values Agility at a $2.5 billion pre-money equity value, unchanged since it was announced on 24 June. What changed is the cash. The June press release projected “more than $620 million of gross proceeds”, of which $420 million was to come from Churchill XI’s trust account “assuming no redemptions”. On 30 October, after the redemption deadline passed, the companies said the raise would instead be approximately $465 million:

about $164 million from the trust account,
about $201 million from a common-stock PIPE at $10 a share, led by Foxconn, with existing and new institutional investors,
$100 million of equity Agility had already received after the June announcement.

The companies did not publish a redemption percentage, but $164 million against roughly $420 million means, by simple arithmetic, that about three-fifths of the SPAC’s public investors chose to take their cash back rather than hold shares in a humanoid robot maker. That is a cooler verdict than the headline valuation suggests, and it is worth remembering when the first-day move is reported either way.

The structure otherwise favours continuity: all existing Agility shareholders roll 100 per cent of their equity into the listed company, and both they and the Churchill sponsor are locked up for 180 days, with early release tied to share-price performance. The strategic investors on the cap table are a who’s who of the robotics supply chain: NVIDIA, Amazon, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Schaeffler, Foxconn, Abico, DCVC and Playground Global.

What is actually being sold

Agility was founded in 2015 out of Oregon State University’s Dynamic Robotics Laboratory by Jonathan Hurst, Damion Shelton and Mikhail Jones. Its product is Digit, a bipedal robot built to move totes and parts in warehouses and factories. The company’s commercial claims are consistent across the press releases and the S-4:

Digit is deployed or committed across nine customer facilities and has accumulated more than 65,000 hours of real-world operation.
At GXO Logistics’ facility in Flowery Branch, Georgia, under a multi-year robots-as-a-service agreement that began in June 2024, Digit has moved more than 100,000 totes. GXO signed in October to add two more sites, in Statesville, North Carolina and Lebanon, Tennessee, starting in early 2027 with Digit 4.
Other named customers are Schaeffler (also an investor), Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, Mercado Libre, Amazon (which, per the S-4, bought five Digits for $1.05 million), and AGCO, which will pilot Digit at its Hesston, Kansas plant in 2027.
CEO Peggy Johnson told investors on 26 October that the company wants 25 facilities and 100 customers by the end of 2027, with a pipeline of more than 30 prospects.

The next model, Digit 5, was unveiled on 15 September and is the thing the public company is really selling. Its numbers, which Agility labels as estimates from pre-production hardware, are concrete enough for an engineer to judge:

payload 50 lb (22.7 kg), 40 per cent more than Digit 4, and reach to 7.2 ft (2.2 m), up from 5.5 ft;
90 minutes of operation per 9-minute charge, a 10:1 run-to-charge ratio against Digit 4’s 2:1, which Agility says allows more than 20 hours of work in a 24-hour day;
new human-like legs driven by proprietary cycloidal actuators, replacing the backward “bird” knees of earlier models, chosen because the requirement had shifted from walking well to lifting heavy things repeatedly and getting down to floor level;
a safety architecture built for “cooperatively safe” work without cages: 360-degree person detection, visual and audio cues that signal intent, an independent safety controller, and the ability to sit down into a statically stable pose and cut motor power before a person can touch it;
swappable grippers on ISO-standard flanges, with a CE mark planned so that Digit 5 can be sold in the EU and UK.

Early-access deliveries are planned for the first half of 2027 and general availability by the end of 2027. In other words, the product that justifies the valuation does not ship for several more quarters.

Hurst’s remarks on hands are the most useful technical note in the coverage. “General-purpose hands don’t exist,” he told The Robot Report; the winning manipulator at recent competitions has been a parallel-jaw gripper, and Agility designs its end effectors around the 25 kg bins its customers actually have, while reserving the right to buy a better hand if someone builds one. That is a different philosophy from the five-fingered demos that dominate humanoid marketing.

The books, opened for the first time

Because this is a SPAC, Agility had to file an S-4, and that document is the real news. The Robot Report and GeekWire both reported the same figures from it:

Net sales of $1.78 million in 2025, up from $310,000 in 2024.
Operating loss of $140.2 million, roughly double the 2024 figure of $69.7 million; cash burn of about $100 million for the year.
Auditor Grant Thornton included a going-concern warning, which Agility says did not account for the SPAC proceeds.
The valuation works out to roughly 1,400 times 2025 revenue.

The S-4 also lays out Digit 5’s pricing, which no private humanoid company has disclosed. Under robots-as-a-service, Agility keeps the robot and charges about $8,500 a month (about $102,000 a year) plus a $25,000 deployment fee, which it models as around $535,000 of revenue per robot over a five-year life. Under outright purchase, the robot costs about $200,000 plus a $20,000 deployment fee and roughly $36,000 a year for software and maintenance, around $400,000 over five years. The filing’s illustrative deployment curve is about 800 Digit 5 units in 2027, 7,000 by 2030 and up to 25,000 by 2035, which at the RaaS rate would be $2.55 billion of annual subscription revenue. RoboFab, the 70,000-square-foot plant in Salem, Oregon, is designed for up to 10,000 robots a year.

The $300 million order book deserves the same scrutiny. Agility consistently describes it as “committed multi-year orders for Digit 5, subject to contractual milestones” that “does not represent current-period revenue”. Johnson told TechCrunch in July that it corresponds to roughly 1,000 robots under the RaaS model. GeekWire’s reading of the S-4 adds the detail that matters: the orders come from one customer, for 1,000 robots over three years, and the filing separately describes a May agreement for at least 1,000 robots with a “related party”, the accounting term for an entity with close ties to the company, such as a major investor. The customer is not named.

Where this sits in the humanoid race

The contrast with the private market is stark. Figure self-reported a $39 billion valuation on a $1 billion Series C last autumn; Apptronik raised $935 million at more than $5.5 billion this year; Shenzhen’s AI2 Robotics raised about $735 million at nearly $3 billion in June. None of them has published a revenue line. Agility, at $2.5 billion, is the cheapest of the group and the only one whose numbers can be checked.

The timing also lands in a week of competing humanoid claims. On 3 November Xiaomi posted video of its full-size humanoid completing an eight-hour shift sorting centre-console side covers at its EV factory; Electrek noted that Xiaomi gave no success rate, no part count and no number of human interventions, after having published a 90.2 per cent success rate for its three-hour test in March. Tesla now says Optimus will not reach outside customers until late 2027. Against that backdrop, Agility’s pitch is deliberately unglamorous: a robot that does one job, under industrial safety certification, with a running count of totes.

Johnson’s own messaging is the most measured of any humanoid CEO. She told TechCrunch that home robots are “10-plus years” away, that warehouses are easier than homes because “at least roads have some discipline to them”, and that Agility is “LLM-agnostic”, using models such as Claude and Gemini as the semantic layer that turns instructions into tasks, while treating the physical layer of balance, locomotion and manipulation, trained on what she calls possibly “the largest data lake of actual operating robotics data in real-world environments”, as the proprietary core.

Why this matters for the future of IT

For most of the past three years, the humanoid story has been told through videos, funding rounds and a handful of pilots. From today one participant has to report quarterly. The 10-Qs will show deployed-unit counts, revenue per robot, gross margin on a $200,000 machine, and whether the 800-unit 2027 plan is tracking. That is the first hard data the sector has produced, and it will recalibrate every private valuation, including the ones that look generous next to Agility’s.

For developers, the architecture Agility describes is the one to expect from industrial humanoids generally: a frontier language model on top for task semantics, a proprietary control stack underneath, a cloud fleet platform (Agility Arc) in between, and a certified safety controller that is independent of all of it. Agility was also named the launch partner for NVIDIA Halos and has a collaboration with Google DeepMind, so the integration points are the familiar ones. Hurst’s point that safety “touches every feature of the robot electrically, mechanically, sensors, computing, everything” is the engineering lesson: a humanoid is not a model with legs, it is a certified machine, and certification is the schedule-critical path.

Open questions

The redemption signal. Three-fifths of the trust walked. Whether that is a judgement on humanoids, on SPACs, or on this valuation will become clearer once the stock has traded for a few weeks, and the 180-day lockup expiry in May 2027 is the next test.
One customer, related party. A $300 million backlog from a single affiliated buyer is a weaker demand signal than a $300 million backlog from ten independent ones. The identity of that customer, and the milestones attached, will be the first thing analysts ask on the first earnings call.
The ramp. Agility deployed Digit in nine facilities over roughly three years. The S-4’s own curve asks for about 800 Digit 5 units in 2027 from a product still in pre-production, with general availability only at year-end.
Going concern. The auditor’s note was written before the $465 million arrived; at a $100 million annual burn that money buys a few years, but the plan assumes revenue scales well before it runs out.
SPAC history. Johnson acknowledged the class of 2021 to TechCrunch and said Agility would avoid the same volatility by “delivering customer by customer, robot by robot”. That is the right answer; it is also what every SPAC CEO said.

None of this makes the listing less significant. For the first time there is a public humanoid company on a U.S. exchange whose claims can be audited, and the first number it published was $1.78 million.