Agility Robotics is going public through a reverse merger with a SPAC, becoming the first pure humanoid robot company on the stock market. The transaction is expected to raise $465 million from retail investors and a tranche of private funding. The move comes nearly a year after Figure AI CEO Colby Adcock predicted Agility would be bankrupt in less than 12 months. Agility CEO Peggy Johnson said the company deliberately avoided dancing or backflipping robots and instead stuck to manual, very repetitive jobs that are hard to find humans to do.

Agility was spun out of Oregon State University in 2015 by researchers working on safe bipedal walking. It has deployed a handful of Digit robots in industrial settings with nine customers, including Schaeffler, GXO, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, and Mercado Libre. The robots mostly move heavy totes, including more than 100,000 of them at a GXO logistics facility. Financially, Agility reported just $174,000 in revenue in the first six months of 2026, mostly from related parties, while losing $362 million in the same period. The company has $300 million in planned contracts from 30 customers for its next-generation robot, Digit 5, which can safely operate around humans rather than only in an isolated work cell. Johnson said that contract pipeline was one of the driving factors behind going public but would not disclose the customers or say whether they are investors.

Digit 5 must hit undisclosed targets across throughput, uptime, and accuracy of placement before the deals close. Prototypes have not been shown publicly; Johnson said they will be demonstrated at CES 2027 and widely available at the end of that year. Agility’s pitch is that a robot can save a company $100,000 per year under a robot-as-a-service model, or more if the robot is purchased outright. Whether the unit economics work depends on Digit 5’s accuracy and how long it can run between recharges and maintenance. Johnson gave the example of a single person lifting a 50-pound object, an informal threshold some workplaces use to avoid injury: “Digit can do that over and over and over. You don’t want to give a human that job. You want to give that to the robot.”

The company faces two key questions: how quickly it can find new customers for Digit 5 and how quickly it can improve the robot’s capabilities. Prospective customers need to spend $500,000 for an on-site proof of concept before a deployment is fully scaled up; four customers were signed up in May 2026. While Digit can place heavy loads with 98% accuracy, it still lacks the ability to do complex manipulation tasks, as do most of today’s robots. Johnson noted that there is no internet of physical data of robot movements, prompting many to simulate data, and said Agility uses those techniques plus 65,000 hours of real operational data from customer facilities to accelerate training. She said the SPAC capital meets the company’s current needs but declined to project that it would be sufficient to become self-sustaining, and she would not share production targets, though the company has said its facility could produce 10,000 robots annually.

CTO Johnathan Hurst described a gradual expansion from bins and totes to picking, kitting, cardboard, and loading and unloading tractor trailers, eventually reaching “100 million robots” and a trillion-dollar company. Agility’s lead comes mainly from having field deployments, not flashier demos.