An early version of Agility Robotics' Digit. Version 5 is set to roll out soon, and the company says it has $300 million in multi-year orders.

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For the past few years, the emerging humanoid robot industry has run on three different types of fuel: huge investments, huge private valuations and huge promises. Figure AI is worth $39 billion on paper, Elon Musk says Optimus will eventually account for 80% of Tesla’s value and Apptronik raised $520 million at a $5 billion valuation in February. The numbers are big and the demos great, but little is visible to public investors, or testable against a quarterly report.

That’s going to change very, very soon.

Agility Robotics is going public via a $2.5 billion SPAC (special purpose acquisition vehicle) that the company expects will deliver more than $620 million in gross proceeds for product development, expansion, R&D and more.

If all goes as planned, later this year Agility will become the only U.S.-listed pure-play humanoid company. Perhaps more importantly, Agility will be the first one whose claims will be subject to the scrutiny of public markets. But it won’t be the first globally. EngineAI has confidentially filed for a Hong Kong IPO in summer 2026, according to Bloomberg, Shanghai-based humanoid maker Agibot is planning a Hong Kong IPO, probably at a $5–6.4 billion value and Unitree, the Hangzhou maker known for its quadrupeds and the G1 humanoid, is pursuing a Shanghai STAR Market listing at a reported $6.2 billion valuation.

With all that new scrutiny, the good news for Agility is that Digit, its humanoid robot that was the first-ever to get a paying job, has now clocked 65,000 hours on the job in live client facilities. Agility’s robots have been moving totes and handling parts for real, paying enterprises: auto-parts giant Schaeffler, logistics operator GXO, Toyota and Latin American e-commerce heavyweight Mercado Libre, among others. At GXO’s facility in Flowery Branch, Georgia, Digit units have reportedly moved more than 100,000 totes since mid-2024. At Schaeffler’s plant in Cheraw, South Carolina, they’ve been running daily factory shifts since early 2025, according to Agility.

There’s a rising tide across the entire humanoid industry at this point: Agibot just placed its G2 wheeled robots on a live production line and is now live-streaming it. Other makers like Figure have also recently picked up jobs for the robots.

"With category-defining commercially deployed humanoid robots operating in real customer environments today, Agility is at the forefront of a new era where safety-first, AI-powered technology can reliably work alongside people to bridge labor shortages, increase productivity, and strengthen the resilience of our supply chains," said CEO Peggy Johnson, the former Microsoft business chief and Magic Leap CEO who took the top job at Agility in early 2025.

Agility also teased its fifth-generation Digit in the press release announcing the move to go public, and said its newest robot would act as a next-generation cobot: a robot that can work alongside humans safely. Digit v5 will be a world-first, the company says, and already has very significant global demand.

“The company is now preparing for the commercial launch of Digit v5, its next-generation humanoid robot designed to be the world’s first cooperatively safe humanoid,” Agility’s press release says. “Agility has already secured more than $300 million of multi-year orders for Digit v5, subject to the realization of certain contractual milestones, with a growing pipeline of over 30 customers, reflecting growing demand from enterprises preparing to deploy humanoid robots at scale.”

Agility CEO Johnson pegs the addressable market in manufacturing, distribution and logistics in the U.S. alone at roughly $1 trillion. That figure deserves the usual skepticism reserved for any total-addressable-market number in a pitch deck, of course. But I should note it’s a much lower estimate than I’ve seen from other humanoid robot executives, who have stressed global GDP that passes through hands is worth perhaps $50 trillion, with large chunks of it accessible to humanoids of sufficient quality. And the labor problem underneath it is real: warehouses and factories across the country face chronic shortages for some of the repetitive, physically punishing tasks Digit is built to absorb.

The cobot or working-with-humans-safely angle is one that Agility is clearly leaning heavily into.

“We set out to build robots capable of performing useful physical work in environments designed for people, and that mission has been central to Agility from day one," says Jonathan Hurst, cofounder and chief robot officer. "We believe cooperative safety is the critical unlock for scaled humanoid adoption, and our next generation Digit represents an important milestone toward a future where robots become trusted partners in the workplace.”

Agility is positioning the fifth-generation Digit as the world’s first "cooperatively safe" humanoid. Today, humanoids are typically fairly segregated from people, in much the same way industrial arms or robots have been caged for decades. Agility’s bet is that mass adoption will start to appear when we have robots and humans sharing work space safely. It’s worth noting in this context that Agility was selected as the launch partner for NVIDIA Halos, billed as the first full-stack safety system for physical AI and humanoid robotics.

Of course, this is a SPAC, and not a typical IPO where the market can assess a company on its own merits. And the vehicle taking Agility public is a Michael Klein SPAC, and Klein’s track record is mixed.

Klein’s Churchill Capital Corp IV merged with EV maker Lucid in 2021; the stock has spent most of its public life below the $10 reference price. Churchill Capital took MultiPlan public in 2020 with less-than-stellar results. More recently the results have improved: Oklo, the Sam Altman-backed nuclear startup Klein helped take public, has been a relative star, and Churchill Capital X completed its merger with quantum-computing firm Infleqtion in early 2026. Still, SPACs have a mixed track record at best.

That history is exactly why Agility’s leadership felt a need to address the choice directly. In a statement to Forbes, Johnson framed the Churchill partnership around the more recent, higher-performing deals rather than the Lucid-era baggage.

"Churchill brings deep experience partnering with category-defining technology companies like Oklo and Infleqtion, guiding them through complex public market transactions and supporting them post IPO," Johnson said via email.

Klein, for his part, leaned into Agility's operational record.

"Agility is a humanoid first mover with proven technology, real-world deployments, and the trust of some of the world's most demanding enterprises," he said, adding that he was excited to help the team "scale deployment of Digit, extend their leadership in physical AI, and create enduring value for shareholders."

The positive for both Churchill and Agility is that all existing Agility shareholders are rolling 100% of their equity into the combined company and accepting a 180-day lockup, so insiders won’t be cashing out at the public’s expense. The roughly $620 million in proceeds is earmarked for fulfilling existing orders, expanding deployments, scaling Digit v5 production and continued platform investment.

It’s going to be interesting, for sure.

Once this all completes, it’ll be one of the first chances we’ll get to see deeper inside a humanoid robot maker’s finances and business. The new company will trade under the ticker AGLT, and whether it soars or sinks, AGLT will give everyone the first real, audited measuring stick for the value of the humanoid robot ecosystem.