Agility becomes first pure-play humanoid robot stock, raising $465M via SPAC

Agility is going public, and it's taking the SPAC route to get there. The humanoid robot maker will raise $465 million in new capital from retail investors plus a tranche of private funding through a reverse merger with a special purpose acquisition company, according to TechCrunch. That makes it the first pure-play humanoid robotics company to trade on the stock market.

The timing is spicy. Roughly a year ago, Figure AI's chief executive publicly predicted Agility would be bankrupt within 12 months. Instead, Agility is cashing a check and ringing a bell. CEO Peggy Johnson told TechCrunch her company never chased the viral stuff. “You don't see a lot of dancing robots or backflipping robots from Agility,” she said, adding that the focus stayed on manual, repetitive jobs that are hard to staff with humans.

Those jobs are real. Agility has Digit robots deployed across nine customers, including Schaeffler, GXO, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada and Mercado Libre, mostly hauling heavy totes — more than 100,000 of them at one GXO logistics site. The money, though, is still tiny: $174,000 in revenue in the first six months of 2026, largely from related parties, against a $362 million loss over the same stretch. The new capital buys time, and the clock is running.

The bet sits on Digit 5. Agility says it has $300 million in planned contracts from 30 customers for the next-generation robot, which can safely work alongside humans instead of being fenced off in an isolated cell like most humanoids. The company hasn't shown prototypes yet — those land at CES 2027, with broad availability at the end of that year. Deals hinge on hitting undisclosed targets for throughput, uptime and placement accuracy, and would-be customers pay $500,000 for an on-site proof of concept first. Four had signed up as of May 2026.

Today's Digit picks up and places loads with 98% accuracy but still can't handle complex manipulation, the wall nearly every humanoid builder is stuck behind. Agility's answer is data: 65,000 hours of real operational footage from real facilities, which Johnson says speeds up training. The sales pitch is that a robot saves a company $100,000 a year under a robot-as-a-service model, more if bought outright. Her example: a person repeatedly lifting a 50-pound object. “You don't want to give a human that job,” she said. “You want to give that to the robot.”

Agility has been at this since spinning out of Oregon State University in 2015, long before physical AI became a funding magnet, and it has said its production facility could build 10,000 robots a year. Johnson wouldn't say whether the SPAC haul makes the company self-sustaining. Cofounder and CTO Johnathan Hurst sketched the longer road at the opening of the company's Fremont R&D site: bins and totes first, then picking, kitting, cardboard, truck loading — “Okay, now we're at 100 million robots, you know? A trillion-dollar company.”