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

The humanoid robot market is flush with money right now. Last week, AI2 Robotics, a Shenzhen-based startup that makes wheeled humanoid robots, raised nearly $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, Figure AI, a San Jose-based startup developing general-purpose humanoid robots, announced it had closed $1 billion in Series C funding at a staggering $39 billion valuation.

By comparison, Peggy Johnson, CEO of Agility Robotics, is surprisingly measured. We spoke by phone last week, right after the company announced plans to go public through a merger with Michael Klein’s Churchill Capital Corp XI, a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. The deal values ​​Agility at approximately $2.5 billion and is expected to raise more than $620 million in total proceeds, the largest capital raise in the history of humanoid robotics. 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 spinout of Oregon State University. The company, based in Salem, Oregon, makes bipedal humanoid robots designed to work in warehouses and factories. Its SPAC maneuver is notable for several reasons. This would make Agility the first purely humanoid robotics company to trade on the public markets, giving retail investors direct exposure to a sector that has until now been available primarily to deep-pocketed venture capital funds. They also provide a rare window into a company’s finances in a space where most competitors closely guard their numbers and even the state of the technology they’re building.

Johnson — a former executive vice president of business development at Microsoft, where she helped engineer LinkedIn’s $26 billion acquisition, and then CEO of Magic Leap, maker of the onetime augmented reality headset — was circumspect throughout our conversation. She declined to provide forward-looking financial guidance, refused to disclose the bill of materials for Agility Digit’s groundbreaking robot, and politely declined whenever questions veered toward speculation.

Asked why Agility went public via a SPAC rather than raising another private round — a structure that bypasses the roadshow and price scrutiny of a traditional IPO — Johnson said a lot of it boils down to the first-mover advantage a company has when it is the first of its kind to go public. For investors clamoring for shares in a buzzy robotics company, Agility is “an acceleration story and a timing story,” she said. Proceeds will also help Agility increase production at its 70,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Salem, Oregon, and meet its existing pipeline of customer orders.

As for the troubled reputation of SPACs — many of the companies that went public this way in 2021 either vanished entirely or traded at well below their offering price — Johnson is unfazed. “If we keep our heads down and keep delivering customer to customer, robot by robot, hopefully we won’t experience the same fluctuations,” she said. “Our biggest competitor right now is just us. How quickly can we execute, how quickly can we continue to add new skills.”

The pipeline goes well beyond pilots, Johnson told TechCrunch, pointing to the more than $300 million in multi-year revenue booked representing nearly 1,000 robots that are part of a robotics-as-a-service model where customers pay a monthly fee rather than purchasing machines outright. “All of the people on our list have already been vetted now and have deployment plans behind their proof of concepts,” Johnson said. Clients include GXO Logistics, Amazon, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, Schaeffler and Mercado Libre.

The number itself is a simple piece of hardware. He’s about 5’9″ tall, weighs about 160 pounds, and is designed to do one thing very well, which is move heavy objects in human-built spaces. Its most distinctive feature is a set of backward-bending knees—called “bird legs”—that allow it to reach from ground level to upper shelves without hitting the knees on warehouse shelves. (Johnson explained that Agility’s founders were not interested in biomimicry per se.) The robot’s hands—two thumbs and two fingers—are also task-specific; They are optimized to hold heavy plastic bags, even when their contents change during transport.

Agility is “non-MBA,” Johnson said, relying on models including Claude and Gemini to handle what she calls the semantic layer — translating high-level instructions into robotic behavior. She described a recent test in which engineers scattered different types of trash on the floor and simply asked Digit to “clean up the mess.” The robot properly assessed, sorted, and trashed everything, including correctly identifying bubble wrap as non-recyclable.

Of course, it’s the physical layer—the balance, movement, and manipulation mechanisms—that Agility considers its core feature, built over more than a decade of real-world deployment. “MBAs had the entire Internet to practice on,” she said. “When you think about physical AI for humans, that doesn’t quite exist yet.” In most companies anyway. Johnson believes Agility is the exception: “We may have the largest data lake of actual operational robotics data in real-world environments.”

Beyond the raw data, safety is where the gap between Agility and its competitors is largest and most important, Johnson said. While competing companies showcase their robots in lab demonstrations and designed videos, Agility had to meet actual industrial safety certification requirements to work inside customer facilities. “You can’t build your own robot and then make it safe,” she said. “This is a redesign. You have to have all the safety approved — the electrical system, all the parts, and the software to support it all.” (This is not a trivial concern since humans are often somewhere in the room. In November, the former head of product safety at Figure AI filed a lawsuit against the company, claiming he was fired after raising concerns that its robots were powerful enough to crack a human skull. Figure has disputed those claims.)

As for the home, Johnson thinks humanoid robots will get there eventually, but she said she doesn’t expect them to serve breakfast in bed anytime soon. “It will take more than 10 years,” she said of the timeline, noting that warehouses and factories, though complex, have fixed aisles, predictable equipment and workflows unlike homes that are chaotic, where dogs, children, visitors and things are left in unexpected places.

“At least the roads have some discipline,” Johnson added, comparing the challenge to that of self-driving vehicles. “Most areas where humanoid robots would work do not.”

Agility does not exclude the local market. Johnson said the company will get involved when it makes sense. Currently, the focus is on the warehouse market, due to the growing numbers of retired workers and younger workers who do not want to take on physically demanding roles. “There are nearly a million jobs in the United States today in these fields that are not being filled,” she said. “They are very, very difficult to hire.”