The Booming Humanoid Robotics Market: A Closer Look at Agility Robotics
The humanoid robotics market is currently flush with money. Last week, AI2 Robotics, a Shenzhen-based startup that makes wheeled humanoid 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 valuing the company at more than $5.5 billion. Last fall, Figure AI, a San Jose-based startup developing general-purpose humanoid robots, said it closed $1 billion in Series C funding at a jaw-dropping $39 billion valuation.
Agility Robotics: A Measured Approach in a Heated Market
By comparison, Peggy Johnson, CEO of Agility Robotics, is surprisingly measured. We spoke by phone last week, just after the company announced plans to go public via 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 generate more than $620 million in gross proceeds, the largest capital raise in the history of humanoid robotics. It is not yet closed; The merger must still be approved by shareholders and reviewed by the SEC, and is expected to be finalized later this year.
Agility Robotics: A Pioneer in Public Trading
Agility was founded in 2015 as a spin-off from Oregon State University. Based in Salem, Oregon, the company makes bipedal humanoid robots designed to work in warehouses and factories. His SPAC maneuver is notable for several reasons. This would make Agility the first pure humanoid robotics company to trade on public markets, giving retail investors direct exposure to a sector until now reserved primarily for deep-pocketed venture capital funds. It also provides a rare window into a company’s finances in a space where most competitors closely monitor their numbers and even the state of the technology they develop.
Peggy Johnson’s Strategic Vision
Johnson — former executive vice president of business development at Microsoft, where she helped lead the $26 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, and later CEO of Magic Leap, the once-hot maker of augmented reality headsets — was guarded throughout our conversation. She declined to provide forward-looking financial advice, refused to disclose the nomenclature of Agility’s flagship robot, Digit, and responded politely whenever questions veered toward speculation.
When asked why Agility is going public via a SPAC rather than raising another private funding round — a structure that skips the roadshow and price review of a traditional IPO — Johnson said it largely comes down to the first-mover advantage the company enjoys when it’s the first of its ilk to go public. For investors clamoring for stock in a hot robotics company, Agility is “a story of acceleration and a story of timing,” she said. Proceeds will also help Agility ramp up production at its 70,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Salem, Oregon, and fulfill an existing pipeline of customer orders.
Navigating the SPAC Landscape
As for the murky reputation of SPACs — many companies that went public this way in 2021 have fizzled completely or are trading well below their offering price — Johnson wasn’t bothered. “If we keep our heads down and continue to deliver customer by customer, robot by robot, we hope we don’t experience the same volatility,” she said. “Our biggest competition right now is us. How quickly we can execute, how quickly we can continue to add new skills.”
Agility’s Expanding Pipeline and Customer Base
The pipeline goes well beyond pilots, Johnson told TechCrunch, pointing to more than $300 million in multi-year revenue earmarked, representing about 1,000 robots that are part of a robots-as-a-service model in which customers pay a monthly fee rather than purchasing the machines outright. “Everyone currently on our list has already been reviewed and has deployment plans behind their proof of concept,” Johnson said. Customers include GXO Logistics, Amazon, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, Schaeffler, and Mercado Libre.
Digit: A Function-Driven Design
Digit itself is a deliberately simple piece of hardware. It’s about 5’9″ tall, weighs about 160 pounds, and is designed to do one thing exceptionally well, which is move heavy objects through man-made spaces. Its most distinctive feature is a set of reverse-curved knees – called “bird legs” – which allow it to reach from floor level to the upper shelves without the knees colliding with the warehouse racks. (Agility’s founders, Johnson explained, were not interested in biomimicry per se.) The robot’s hands – two thumbs and two fingers – are also task-specific; they are optimized to grip heavy plastic bins, even when their contents change during transport.
AI Integration and Proprietary Advantages
Johnson said Agility is “LLM agnostic,” relying on models such as Claude and Gemini to manage what she calls the semantic layer – translating high-level instructions into robot behavior. She described a recent test in which engineers scattered different types of trash on the floor and simply asked Digit to “clean up that mess.” The robot assessed, sorted and put everything into bins correctly, including correctly identifying the bubble wrap as non-recyclable.
Of course, it’s the physical layer – the mechanics of balance, locomotion and manipulation – that Agility sees as its main proprietary advantage, built over more than a decade of real-world deployment. “The LLMs had all the internet to practice on,” she said. “When you think about physical humanoid AI, it doesn’t exist yet.” At least in most companies. Johnson believes Agility is the exception: “We have perhaps the largest data lake of real operational robotic data in real environments. »
Emphasizing Safety and Practical Applications
Beyond raw data, Johnson said, it’s in security where the gap between Agility and its competitors is largest and most consequential. While competing companies showcase their robots in lab demonstrations and choreographed videos, Agility has had to meet current industrial safety certification requirements to operate in customer facilities. “You can’t build your robot and then secure it,” she said. “It’s an overhaul. You have to get all the safety certified: the electrical system, all the parts and the software to support all of that.” (This is not a trivial concern given that humans are often somewhere in the room. In November, Figure AI’s former head of product safety sued the company, alleging that he was fired after raising concerns that its robots were powerful enough to fracture a human skull. Figure has disputed these claims.)
Looking Towards the Future
As for the house, Johnson thinks the humanoids will get there eventually, but she said not to expect them to deliver breakfast in bed anytime soon. It will take “more than 10 years,” she said of the timeline, observing that warehouses and factories, for all their complexity, have fixed aisles and predictable equipment and workflows, unlike chaotic homes, with dogs, babies, visitors and items left in unexpected places.
“At least the roads have some discipline,” Johnson added, comparing the challenge to that of autonomous vehicles. “Most areas in which humanoids will operate will not.”
Agility does not exclude the domestic market. Johnson said the company will get in there when it makes sense. For now, however, the company is focusing on the warehouse market, given the growing number of retired and younger workers who are unwilling to take on physically demanding roles. “There are about a million jobs in these fields in the United States today that are unfilled,” she said. “It’s just very, very difficult to hire them. »
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