The humanoid robotics market is currently awash in so much cash you could practically swim in it - if you were a robot designed for swimming, which, to be fair, most of these things aren't. Last week, AI2 Robotics, a Shenzhen-based startup making wheeled humanoids, raised roughly $735 million at a nearly $3 billion valuation. Earlier this year, Apptronik, an Austin-based outfit focused on manufacturing and logistics bots, closed a $935 million round valuing the company at over $5.5 billion. And last fall, Figure AI, a San Jose-based general-purpose humanoid developer, self-reported a $1 billion Series C at an eye-popping $39 billion valuation.
By comparison, Peggy Johnson, CEO of Agility Robotics, is refreshingly grounded. We spoke by phone last week, just after the company announced plans to go public via a merger with Michael Klein's Churchill Capital Corp XI, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). The deal values Agility at around $2.5 billion and is expected to raise over $620 million in gross proceeds - the largest capital raise in humanoid robotics history. It hasn't closed yet; it still needs shareholder approval and SEC review, with completion expected later this year.
Agility was founded in 2015 as a spinoff from Oregon State University. Based in Salem, Oregon, the company makes bipedal humanoid robots designed for warehouses and factories. Its SPAC maneuver is notable for several reasons: it would make Agility the first pure-play humanoid robotics company on public markets, giving retail investors direct exposure to a sector previously reserved for deep-pocketed VC funds. It also offers a rare window into the finances of a business in a space where most competitors guard their numbers like state secrets.
Johnson - formerly executive vice president at Microsoft, where she helped engineer the $26 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, and later CEO of Magic Leap, the once-hyped AR headset maker - was careful throughout our conversation. She declined to offer forward-looking financial guidance, declined to disclose the bill of materials for Agility's flagship robot Digit, and pushed back politely whenever questions veered toward speculation.
Asked why Agility is going public via a SPAC rather than raising another private round, Johnson cited first-mover advantage. For investors clamoring for shares in a buzzy robotics company, Agility is "an acceleration story and a timing story." The proceeds will help ramp up production at its 70,000-square-foot facility in Salem and fulfill an existing pipeline of customer orders.
As for SPACs' troubled reputation - many companies that went public that way in 2021 famously fizzled or trade well below their offering price - Johnson was unfazed. "If we just keep our head down, keep delivering customer by customer, robot by robot, we hopefully won't experience the same volatility," she said. "Our biggest competitor right now is just us."
The pipeline goes well beyond pilots, Johnson said, pointing to over $300 million in booked, multi-year revenue representing roughly 1,000 robots under a robots-as-a-service model where customers pay a monthly fee. Customers include GXO Logistics, Amazon, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, Schaeffler, and Mercado Libre.
Digit itself is a deliberately unfussy piece of hardware. Standing about 5'9" and weighing around 160 pounds, it's designed to do one thing exceptionally well: move heavy objects in human-built spaces. Its most distinctive feature is a set of reverse-bend knees - "bird legs" - that allow it to reach from floor level to overhead shelving without colliding with warehouse racking. The robot's hands - two thumbs and two fingers - are optimized for gripping heavy plastic totes, even as their contents shift.
Johnson said Agility is "LLM-agnostic," drawing on models including Claude and Gemini for the semantic layer - translating high-level instructions into robot behavior. She described a test where engineers scattered different types of trash on the floor and told Digit simply to "clean up this mess." The robot correctly identified bubble wrap as non-recyclable. Impressive, but still no match for a teenager with a chore list.
Of course, it's the physical layer - balance, locomotion, manipulation - that Agility considers its core advantage, built over a decade of real-world deployment. "The LLMs had the entire internet to train on," Johnson said. "When you think about the physical AI of humanoids - that doesn't quite exist yet." She believes Agility is the exception: "We may have the largest data lake of actual operating robotics data in real-world environments."
Beyond raw data, safety is where the gulf between Agility and competitors is biggest. While rivals showcase robots in lab demos, Agility has had to meet actual industrial safety certification requirements. "You can't build your robot and then make it safe," Johnson said. "That's a redesign." (It's not a trivial concern: back in November, Figure AI's former head of product safety sued the company, alleging he was fired after raising concerns that its robots were powerful enough to fracture a human skull. Figure has disputed the claims.)
As for the home, Johnson thinks humanoids will get there eventually, but not to expect breakfast in bed anytime soon. It'll be "10-plus years," she said, noting that homes are chaotic - dogs, babies, visitors, objects left in unexpected places. "At least roads have some discipline to them," she added, comparing the challenge to autonomous vehicles. Agility isn't ruling out the home market, but for now it's laser-focused on warehouses, given over a million unfilled jobs in the US in physically demanding roles. "They're just very, very hard to hire for," she said. So until robots can handle toddlers and throw pillows, they'll stick to stacking totes.