Agility Robotics became the first US humanoid-robot maker to go public, listing on Thursday through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company that raised about $465 million. The Oregon firm, led by chief executive Peggy Johnson, makes Digit, a two-legged robot built to move totes and boxes in warehouses and factories. Shares, trading under the ticker AGLT, closed Friday at $9.90, down nearly 14 percent from their debut as markets swung after the midterm elections.
The listing exposes how far the economics trail the ambition. Agility reported just $1.8 million in revenue last year against a $138.1 million net loss, according to regulatory filings. Its robots operate in nine customer facilities, including those of Amazon, Toyota and the logistics firm GXO, and the company has disclosed more than $300 million in orders for 1,000 robots from a single customer that has financial ties to Agility itself. The company estimates its new Digit 5 will cost $150,000 in materials alone at first, a figure it projects will fall to $30,000 only at an annual production rate of 10,000 units, a scale no humanoid maker has reached.
Johnson, 65, is a former Qualcomm and Microsoft dealmaker who steered Microsoft's $26.2 billion LinkedIn acquisition before running the augmented-reality startup Magic Leap. She is betting that labor shortages will pull demand from industry, pointing to a Deloitte estimate that 1.9 million US manufacturing jobs could go unfilled by 2033, and says Agility has 30 qualified prospects in its pipeline. "This is a real business problem right now, and we can fill that need that companies have for automation," she told Business Insider.
The debut comes as capital floods the category. Venture firms put $33.4 billion into robotics and physical-AI companies in the first half of 2026, already more than the $28.7 billion invested in all of 2025, according to PitchBook data cited by CNBC. Amazon, whose warehouses use Agility's robots, has formed a new Personal Robotics Group and is hiring for a "new-to-world robot product" for the home, five years after its $1,450 Astro shipped to only a few thousand customers. Rivals are better capitalized than Agility: Figure AI was recently valued at $39 billion and Apptronik at about $5.5 billion, while Tesla is producing its Optimus robot at its Fremont factory.
Whether any of it works at the price customers will pay remains the open question. A separate account of Tau Robotics, a startup cleaning San Francisco homes at $30 per robot per hour, found two machines covered about 80 percent of a single floor in an hour, needed battery swaps after sixty minutes, and were steered by a human operator in a remote shop. The robotics analyst Michelle Sun, who has tracked the sector closely, estimated it cost roughly $818 to deliver a clean that sold for $180. Agility's own filings assume Digit lasts five years and recoups its cost in about 18 months under a robot-as-a-service model, projections that depend entirely on the scale-up it has yet to prove. Johnson does not expect humanoids in people's homes within five years; her case to public investors rests on the factory floor, where the robots still cost far more to build than they earn.