Agility Robotics Goes Public, Humanoid Robot Digit Runs on Claude and Gemini

Agility Robotics, the maker of the humanoid warehouse robot Digit, has announced a merger with the special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Churchill Capital Corp XI, led by Michael Klein. The deal values the company at approximately $2.5 billion and is expected to raise more than $620 million in gross proceeds, the largest single capital raise in the history of the humanoid robotics industry. Once finalized, expected later in 2026, Agility will become the first pure-play humanoid robotics company listed on a public stock exchange.

Digit is a bipedal robot designed specifically for work in warehouses and factories. It carries heavy items, and its distinctive backward-bending legs let it reach from the floor to high shelving without colliding with infrastructure. Its hands, each with two thumbs and two fingers, are optimized for gripping the plastic totes standard in the warehouses of the company's customers.

Claude and Gemini as the Semantic Layer

Agility describes its approach as language-model agnostic. The company uses both Claude and Gemini for what it calls the semantic layer, translating general natural-language commands into concrete sequences of robot movements. In one demonstration, engineers scattered various kinds of trash on the floor and simply told Digit to "clean up this mess." The robot assessed the situation on its own, sorted the debris, and dropped it into the appropriate bins.

This approach sets Agility apart from some competitors building their own closed foundation models to control their robots. The company instead favors combining off-the-shelf large language models for high-level reasoning with its own data on physical robot performance, gathered from real-world deployments.

We may have the largest dataset of real-world robot work in production environments - Peggy Johnson, CEO of Agility Robotics

Caution Amid the Hype

In an interview with TechCrunch, Johnson emphasized execution over announcements, distancing herself from promises of humanoid robots quickly entering people's homes. In her view, home deployment is more than a decade away, because unlike orderly warehouses, homes are chaotic and full of unpredictable elements. Agility is instead focusing on industry and logistics, where working conditions are controlled and safety is certified.

Addressing concerns about stock volatility following a SPAC debut, a mechanism that has in the past been used to inflate the valuations of tech companies without revenue to back them up, Johnson said the company intends to build credibility step by step, delivery by delivery, robot by robot.

A Red-Hot Humanoid Robotics Market

Agility's stock market debut comes amid a wave of massive funding rounds across the sector. China's AI2 Robotics raised about $735 million at a valuation of nearly $3 billion, Apptronik closed a $935 million round at a valuation of more than $5.5 billion, and Figure AI is now valued at $39 billion. Unlike some of these companies, Agility can point to real revenue: more than $300 million in contracted multi-year proceeds from roughly a thousand deployed robots working on a subscription model for customers such as GXO Logistics, Amazon, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, Schaeffler and Mercado Libre.

For Poland's logistics and manufacturing sector, where warehouse automation has been growing for years, Agility's public listing means easier access to the company's financial results and a chance to compare it with local warehouse robotics projects such as Warsaw-based Nomagic. It is also a sign that pairing large language models with physical robots is moving from the demonstration stage into a commercial one, measured in revenue and signed contracts.

Sources: This humanoid robotics company is going public, but its CEO isn't promising a robot in your home anytime soon (techcrunch.com)