Agility Robotics to go public in $2.5 billion SPAC deal

Agility Robotics said it will go public through a $2.5 billion merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI, a Michael Klein-backed SPAC, in a deal that is expected to generate more than $620 million in gross proceeds. The transaction would create what Agility calls the only U.S. publicly listed pure-play humanoid company with proven, active commercial deployments, putting a fast-growing but still unproven robotics category in front of public investors.

The company said about $200 million of the proceeds will come from a common-stock PIPE committed at $10 a share. Agility expects the combined company to list on a major North American exchange under the ticker AGLT. The deal values Agility at a $2.5 billion pre-money equity valuation, a steep bet on a business that has spent more than a decade moving from university lab work to commercial use.

That trajectory began in 2015, when Jonathan Hurst, Damion Shelton and Mikhail Jones spun Agility out of Oregon State University’s Dynamic Robotics Laboratory. The company has since pushed its Digit line from prototype to deployment, and says more than $300 million of multi-year contracted Digit v5 orders have already been secured. Agility says the robots are operating in commercial environments with Schaeffler, GXO and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, giving the company a customer list that is more industrial than speculative.

Amazon began testing Digit in its facilities in 2023, underscoring how major logistics operators have been willing to experiment with humanoid machines even before the category has proven mass-market economics. Agility says its strategic investors and partners include NVIDIA, Amazon, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Foxconn, DCVC, Playground Global and Abico, a roster that signals both capital support and a push to tie the company’s technology to the broader AI supply chain.

The company is also leaning on manufacturing scale as part of the pitch. Agility opened RoboFab in Salem, Oregon, a 70,000-square-foot factory it said was designed to produce more than 10,000 robots a year and employ more than 500 workers at full capacity. Agility says the proceeds from the SPAC will help fulfill existing customer orders, expand commercial deployments, scale Digit v5 production and keep investing in its integrated platform.

Peggy Johnson, Agility’s chief executive, has cast humanoid robots as a critical driver of American technology leadership and global industry. The market opportunity, as management estimates it, spans about $1 trillion across manufacturing, distribution and logistics in the United States, a number that explains why public markets are being asked to back a robot maker whose next stage depends on turning active deployments into durable revenue.