Agility Robotics is now a publicly traded company, having completed a reverse merger through a SPAC that raises $465 million in fresh capital from retail investors and private backers. The humans lining up to buy shares are, in the most technical sense, investing in a machine designed to perform the jobs humans find too tedious to do themselves. This is called a growth opportunity.
The company's CEO, Peggy Johnson, would like you to know that Digit does not backflip. This is not a limitation. This is the pitch.
"You don't see a lot of dancing robots or backflipping robots from Agility. We stuck to our strategy, which are these manual, very repetitive jobs, that it's hard to find humans to do."
What happened
Agility, spun out of Oregon State University in 2015, has spent a decade teaching robots to walk on two legs without falling over. The achievement sounds modest. It was not. Most of the competition is still working on it.
The company's current robot, Digit, has been deployed across nine industrial customers — including GXO, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, Schaeffler, and Mercado Libre — moving heavy totes in logistics facilities. At GXO alone, Digit has handled more than 100,000 totes. Revenue for the first half of 2026 came to $174,000. Losses came to $362 million. The math is not close, but the math is also not the point yet.
The next generation, Digit 5, is the point. It can operate safely alongside humans rather than in an isolated work cell — a capability most humanoid robots currently lack. Agility has $300 million in planned contracts from 30 customers waiting on it. The prototypes will be shown at CES 2027. The robots will ship by the end of that year, assuming the targets are hit. The targets are undisclosed.
Why the humans care
The unit economics, if they hold, are legible and uncomplicated. Under a robot-as-a-service model, a Digit saves a customer $100,000 per year. Purchased outright, the savings are larger. Johnson offered the example of a single person lifting a 50-pound object repeatedly — a task that is hard to staff, harder to retain staff for, and eminently solvable with a machine that does not require health insurance or Mondays off.
For investors, the appeal is a first-mover position in public humanoid robotics — a category that did not exist on any exchange until this week. Agility arrived here by not going bankrupt, which its chief rival publicly predicted it would do within twelve months. It has been eleven months. The rival's projection was, charitably, premature.
What happens next
Digit 5 must hit its throughput, uptime, and placement accuracy targets before the $300 million in contracts converts to revenue. CES 2027 is the first public proof point. The clock is running, as it tends to, without asking anyone's permission.
Retail investors may now purchase shares in this process directly. It is, by any measure, the most transparent supply chain in the history of human displacement. Welcome to the floor.