This humanoid robotics company is going public, but the CEO isn’t promising a robot in your home anytime soon

The market for humanoid robots is awash with money right now. Last week, AI2 Robotics, a Shenzhen-based startup that makes humanoid wheeled robots, raised about $735 million at a valuation of nearly $3 billion. Earlier this year, Apptronik, an Austin-based maker of humanoid robots for manufacturing and logistics, closed a $935 million funding round that valued the company at more than $5.5 billion. Last fall, Mdebo AI, a San Jose-based startup that builds general-purpose humanoid robots, self-reported that it had closed $1 billion in Series C funding at a staggering $39 billion.

By comparison, Peggy Johnson, CEO of Agility Robotics, is remarkably measured. We spoke by phone last week, shortly after the company announced plans to go public in a merger with Michael Klein’s Churchill Capital Corp XI, a special-purpose acquisitions company, or SPAC. The deal values ​​Agility at approximately $2.5 billion and is expected to raise more than $620 million in total funding, the largest capital raise in humanoid robotics history. It is not closed yet; The merger still requires shareholder approval and SEC review, and is expected to be completed 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 to work in warehouses and factories. Its SPAC approach is notable for several reasons. It would make Agility the first pure-play humanoid robotics company to trade on the public markets, giving retail investors direct exposure to a sector that is now mostly available to deep VC funds. It also provides a rare window into corporate finance in a space where most competitors are very careful about their numbers and the state of the technology they’re building.

Johnson — formerly senior vice president of business development at Microsoft, where he helped build the $26 billion LinkedIn, and later CEO of Magic Leap, the once-beloved headset maker — was meticulous throughout our conversation. He declined to provide forward-looking financial guidance, refused to disclose the bill of materials for Agility Digit’s flagship robot, and politely backed away whenever questions turned to speculation.

Asked why Agility is going public with a SPAC rather than raising another private round — a structure that skips the roadshow and pricing scrutiny of a traditional IPO — Johnson said much of it stems from the head start advantage a company enjoys when it goes public for the first time. For investors looking for shares in a busy robotics company, Agility is “a matter of momentum and a matter of timing,” he said. The proceeds will also help Agility increase production at its 70,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Salem, Oregon, and fill the existing pipeline of customer orders.

As for the troubled reputation of SPACs — many companies that went public that way in 2021 either completely disappointed or traded below their value — Johnson was unconcerned. “If we keep our heads down, we continue to deliver customer after customer, robot after robot, hopefully we won’t have the same volatility,” he said. “Our biggest competitor right now is just us. How fast we can do it, how fast we can keep adding new capabilities.”

The pipeline goes well beyond pilots, Johnson told TechCrunch, pointing to more than $300 million in booked, multi-year financing for nearly 1,000 robots that are part of a robotics model where customers pay a monthly fee rather than buying equipment outright. “Everyone on our list has now been vetted, and they have plans to ship after their proof of concepts,” Johnson said. Customers include GXO Logistics, Amazon, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, Schaeffler, and Mercado Libre.

The Digit itself is a deliberately unfussy piece of hardware. It stands about 5’9″, weighs 160 pounds, and is built to do one thing very well, which is to move heavy objects around man-made surfaces. Its most distinctive feature is a set of backward-facing knees – called “bird legs” – that allow it to reach from the ground level to the upper shelves without the knees bumping into the material. (Agility’s founders, Johnson explained, weren’t interested in biomimicry for its own sake.) The robot’s hands — two thumbs and two fingers — are task-specific; they are designed to hold heavy plastic totes, as their contents change in transit.

Johnson said Agility is “LLM-agnostic,” drawing on models including Claude and Gemini to handle what he calls the semantic layer — translating high-level instructions into robot behavior. He described a recent experiment where engineers spread different types of garbage on the floor and told Digit to “clean up this mess.” The robot inspected, sorted, and assembled everything correctly, including correctly identifying the bubble wrap as non-reusable.

Of course, the visual layer – the engineering of balance, mobility, and manipulation – is where Agility considers its main proprietary advantage, built over more than a decade of real-world deployments. “LLMs had the entire Internet to train,” he said. “If you think about physical AI for humanoids – that doesn’t exist yet.” For most companies, however. Johnson believes that Agility is the exception: “We may have the largest data set of robotics operating in real-world environments.”

Beyond the raw data, Johnson said, security is where the gap between Agility and its competitors is the biggest and most important. While rival companies show off their robots in lab demos and video recordings, Agility has had to meet actual industrial safety certification requirements to operate inside customer facilities. “You can’t build your own robot and make it safe,” he said. “That’s a redesign. You have to have the whole safety certificate – the electrical system, all the components, and the software to support all of that.” (It’s no small concern given that people are often somewhere in the room. Back in November, the former head of product safety at Figure AI sued the company, saying he was fired after raising concerns that its robots were powerful enough to fracture a human skull. Figure denies the claims.)

As for the home, Johnson thinks humanoids will get there eventually, but he said he doesn’t expect them to bring breakfast in bed anytime soon. It will be “10 years or more,” he said of the timeline, noting that warehouses and factories, for all their complexity, have fixed locations and predictable machines and workflows unlike chaotic homes, with dogs, children, visitors, and things left in unexpected places.

“At least the roads have some discipline in them,” added Johnson, comparing the challenge to that of autonomous vehicles. “A lot of places where humanoids are going to work don’t do that.”

Agility does not exclude the domestic market. Johnson said the company would step in if it felt right. For now, however, the laser is focused on the retail market, given the growing numbers of retiring workers and young workers unwilling to take on demanding roles. “There are over a million jobs in the US today in these unfilled areas,” he said. “It’s very difficult to hire them.”