Agility is set to become a publicly traded company through a reverse merger with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. The transaction is expected to raise $465 million in new capital from private funding and retail investors. The move comes after a period of significant losses, with the company reporting a $362 million loss in the first six months of 2026 despite earning $174,000 in revenue during that same timeframe.
Spun out of Oregon State University in 2015, Agility focuses on deploying its Digit robots for repetitive industrial tasks. The company currently serves nine customers, including Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, GXO, Schaeffler, and Mercado Libre. At a GXO logistics facility, Digit robots have moved more than 100,000 heavy totes. While the current models lack complex manipulation abilities, they can lift 50-pound objects with 98% placement accuracy.
CEO Peggy Johnson stated that the company's strategy focuses on manual, repetitive jobs that are difficult to staff with humans. "You don't see a lot of dancing robots or backflipping robots from Agility," Johnson told TechCrunch. She added, "We stuck to our strategy, which [are] these manual, very repetitive jobs, that it's hard to find humans to do."
The company is banking on its next generation of hardware, Digit 5, to drive growth. Agility has $300 million in planned contracts from 30 customers for the new model, which is designed to operate safely around humans rather than in isolated work cells. Prototypes of Digit 5 are scheduled for demonstration at CES 2027, with wide availability expected by the end of that year.
To secure these contracts, Digit 5 must meet undisclosed targets for uptime, throughput, and placement accuracy. Agility's business model offers robots to companies via a robot-as-a-service model, which the company claims can save customers $100,000 a year, or even more if the unit is purchased outright. To scale deployments, prospective customers must pay $500,000 for an on-site proof of concept; four customers had signed up for this as of May 2026.
To accelerate robot training, Agility utilizes 65,000 hours of real operational data collected from customers in actual facilities. While the company has not released specific production targets for Digit 5, it has stated its production facility has the capacity to manufacture 10,000 robots annually.
