Agility Robotics Begins Trading on Nasdaq After $2.5 Billion SPAC Merger

The merger valued Agility at $2.5 billion before new money, and its shares were set to trade on Nasdaq under the ticker AGLT. Churchill XI shareholders approved the deal on November 2, with more than 84% of votes cast in favour, according to Dealroom.

The listing gives public investors a direct way to bet on humanoid robots in factories and warehouses, a market that so far exists mostly in pilot projects. It also forces Agility to disclose, for the first time, quarterly figures on cash burn, the cost of building each robot and the terms of its contracts, data the industry has largely kept private.

The deal raised less than first planned. Holders of about 61.5% of Churchill XI's Class A shares redeemed them, cutting the cash in the trust from about $424 million to about $164 million, according to Dealroom. With a $201 million private placement led by Foxconn at $10 a share and $100 million in equity the company had already received, gross proceeds came to about $465 million, compared with more than $620 million projected when the merger was announced in June. Agility has said it will use the money for manufacturing and commercial deployments of Digit.

"Challenging market out there, but we're well capitalized," chief executive Peggy Johnson told Semafor.

Agility says it has $300 million in orders for its newest robot, Digit 5, though Semafor reported that they all come from one customer, which the company has not named. Its existing customers include the logistics group GXO, the German industrial supplier Schaeffler and Toyota. At one GXO site, Digit robots have moved more than 100,000 totes, and GXO plans to extend them to two more US facilities in 2027, according to Dealroom. The economics of those deployments have not been disclosed.

Safety certification is the company's central bet. Humanoid robots cannot currently work in factories unless they are kept behind physical barriers, because insurers will not cover them without third-party certification, Semafor reported. Digit 5 is designed to work close to people and could be certified next year. That design has come at a cost in agility: the company's chief robot officer wrote last month that "Digit 5 feels more like a forklift than the graceful humanoid I set out to build," while arguing the trade-off was necessary.

Agility lists into a cooler market than the one it planned for. China's Unitree, which sells humanoids for far less than its American rivals, listed in Shanghai in August and has since lost value as investors question whether demand matches expectations. US humanoid makers including Agility are pitching their robots as a way to automate factories and compete with China's fast-growing robotics sector.

Existing Agility shareholders rolled their stakes into the combined company and are subject to a 180-day lock-up. Its first quarterly report as a public company will be the first public test of how its order book converts into revenue.