Agility Robotics started trading on Nasdaq on November 5 under the ticker AGLT, with warrants listed as AGLTW. The listing closes the company’s merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI, a blank-check company, and Agility says the deal and the financing around it raised about $465 million before expenses. That total includes a private placement led by Foxconn and $100 million that arrived before the deal closed.

Agility describes itself as the first U.S.-listed pure-play humanoid company with active commercial deployments. Unitree and UBTECH are already public in Shanghai and Hong Kong. What Agility can point to that most rivals cannot is a robot that has been doing paid work at a customer site for more than two years.

What the robot has actually done

The best evidence is GXO’s warehouse in Flowery Branch, Georgia. The two companies started with a proof of concept there in late 2023 and signed a multi-year robots-as-a-service contract in June 2024. Since then, according to both companies, Digit has moved more than 100,000 totes, picking them up and placing them onto conveyors next to the site’s existing automation.

GXO is adding two more sites, in Statesville, North Carolina, and Lebanon, Tennessee. Both are expected to start in early 2027 with Digit 4 and switch to Digit 5 once it is commercially available.

Agility also names Schaeffler and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada as customers, says AGCO has signed for a pilot starting in 2027, and lists three unnamed manufacturers in paid programs: a global automaker, an automotive parts supplier and a consumer products company. Across all of them, the company counts more than 65,000 hours of Digit operation.

“Digit is doing real work in customer operations today, taking on repetitive, physically demanding tasks.”

Peggy Johnson, Agility CEO, in the listing announcement

The $300 million question

The number investors will hear most is the more than $300 million in multi-year orders for Digit 5. Read the fine print before treating it as sales. Agility says those orders are “subject to contractual milestones, product features and specifications.” That is a backlog with conditions attached, not revenue, and the robot it depends on is not shipping yet. Early customer access is planned for the first half of 2027, with general availability targeted for the end of that year.

Digit 5 is a different machine from the one in Georgia. Agility says it is built to lift up to 50 pounds repeatedly, take interchangeable end effectors and work closer to people. Battery maker Nyobolt’s packs are meant to recharge it in about nine minutes, which Agility says should allow more than 20 hours of work in a 24-hour day.

Co-founder Jonathan Hurst is unusually candid about the trade-offs. Writing in IEEE Spectrum’s November issue, he calls Digit 5 “heavy and bulky, lacking the graceful natural motion of its predecessors.” Getting to a product customers would pay for, he writes, meant taking “a path that is very different from what I first imagined.”

What the money buys

Agility says it will spend the proceeds on filling orders, adding deployments and scaling production. The factory is already built. RoboFab, in Salem, Oregon, covers 70,000 square feet and is designed for up to 10,000 robots a year. Designed capacity is not output, though, and the company has not said how many robots it has built there.