Agility Robotics said this week it will go public at a valuation of about $2.5 billion, making the maker of a warehouse humanoid called Digit the first pure-play humanoid company to reach the US public markets. The route is a SPAC, a merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI, and the timing is deliberate. "We're hitting now as a first mover," cofounder Jonathan Hurst told Business Insider, "and we want to be defining the humanoid industry."
The pitch rests on a single claim that separates Agility from the field: its robots are already doing real work. While Tesla's Optimus and most rivals still live in demo reels, Digit has been deployed across nine customer facilities, including those of Amazon, Toyota and the logistics firm GXO. CEO Peggy Johnson, formerly of Microsoft and Magic Leap, frames those deployments as a moat. Years of real operating data, she argues, let Agility teach the robot new skills faster than competitors stuck running closed pilots, the same data-flywheel logic that self-driving boosters have leaned on for years.
The structure is worth a raised eyebrow. A SPAC is a cash-filled shell that lets a company skip the scrutiny of a traditional IPO, the same vehicle that produced a wave of overhyped listings when interest rates were low in 2021. Agility says it chose the route to bring in sponsor Michael Klein, who previously took the nuclear startup Oklo and the EV maker Lucid public, and the deal is expected to raise more than $600 million, with Foxconn anchoring a private placement and Nvidia, Amazon and SoftBank already on the cap table. The money is earmarked for fulfilling orders, Agility says it has more than $300 million in multiyear bookings for its next-generation Digit, and for scaling production.
It arrives in a sector that has stopped looking like a hardware graveyard. Robotics and physical-AI startups have raised $55.8 billion so far in 2026 by one measure, already nearly double all of last year, with foundation-model companies like Skild AI valued above $14 billion on the promise of one brain that can run any robot body. Investors are pricing robots like AI infrastructure, not factory equipment, betting that the software layer is where the value pools.
The shadow over the celebration is geographic. Chinese firms shipped roughly 90 percent of the world's humanoid robots last year, and Unitree is preparing its own listing at a valuation reported as high as $7 billion. Agility's answer is to compete on safety rather than volume: it says the new Digit will be the first humanoid able to work in human spaces without a physical barrier, using a safety system built with Nvidia. That is a meaningful technical bet, and going public will force it into the open. For the first time, a humanoid company will have to show the world not just a robot that can walk, but quarterly numbers that prove the business underneath it can stand on its own.