Agility Robotics Lists on Nasdaq After $465 Million SPAC Merger
Humanoid robot maker Agility Robotics went public through a SPAC deal that raised $465 million. What the money funds and when Digit 5 robots ship.
Agility Robotics Inc., which builds humanoid robots for warehouses and factories, began trading on the Nasdaq after completing a merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI Corp., a special-purpose acquisition company. According to SiliconANGLE, the merger closed on Wednesday, and together with certain related financings it brought in $465 million before transaction fees.
The company said it will spend that money on launching its newest robot, Digit 5, and on expanding its manufacturing capacity.
How the SPAC route works
A SPAC is a shell company with no business of its own. It sells shares on a stock exchange, raises cash, and then merges with a private company. Once the merger is done, the private company takes over the shell’s listing and trades as a public company. The route is generally simpler than a traditional initial public offering, which involves a full underwritten share sale.
For Agility, the deal turns a privately held robotics startup into a listed company that ordinary investors can buy and sell. The ticker symbol and the opening share price were not disclosed in the report.
What Digit 5 is
Digit 5 stands nearly six feet tall and runs for up to 20 hours on a battery charge, the company says. Agility says the robot can lift and carry as much as 50 pounds. It moves on custom actuators built around cycloidal drives, a motor design that gives up some speed in exchange for more lifting force.
The batteries come from Nyobolt Ltd., a British startup that uses niobium to make charging faster. Agility says a Digit 5 can recharge in nine minutes.
Part of the robot’s software runs on Nvidia’s IGX Thor line of processors. The top chip in that series, the T7000, pairs a 14-core central processor with a computer vision accelerator and two graphics processors, one of them an embedded GPU with 2,560 cores. Digit 5 also uses Nvidia’s HALOS toolkit, which includes hazard-avoidance algorithms and materials that help companies obtain the safety certifications needed before robots can be deployed commercially.
Why it matters for shareholders and customers
Agility now reports to public investors, and its pitch rests on demand that has not yet turned into shipped products. The company says it has collected more than $300 million in pre-orders for Digit 5. Named customers include Toyota Motor Co. and GXO Logistics Inc., a publicly traded logistics company. Agility also says it has three other large manufacturing customers and more than 30 prospective buyers in its pipeline. Those figures come from the company and have not been broken out by customer.
Chief Executive Peggy Johnson said Digit already handles “repetitive, physically demanding tasks” in customer operations. She said that public-company status gives Agility access to more resources to get its robots into more workplaces.
For workers at customer sites, the robots are aimed at the heavy, repetitive lifting jobs Johnson described. For suppliers, the planned factory expansion means larger orders for parts such as batteries and chips.
What comes next
Agility plans to offer Digit 5 through an early access program in the first half of 2027, with general availability later that year. Production will take place at a 70,000-square-foot factory in Salem, Oregon, which the company says is planned to turn out up to 10,000 robots a year.
Shareholders will be watching whether the pre-orders convert into deliveries on that schedule, since the company has tied its use of the $465 million to the Digit 5 rollout and the build-out of factory capacity.
Source: SiliconANGLE
