Agility Robotics of Salem, Ore., made its Nasdaq debut Thursday as the first publicly traded U.S. company devoted solely to humanoid robots — offering an ambitious vision for how the technology will change work, and a cautious view of how long it will take.
“Maybe we’ll never have faster-than-light travel. Maybe we’ll never have transporters from Star Trek,” said Jonathan Hurst, the company’s co-founder and chief robot officer. “But we absolutely will have machines that can do all of the physical work that a person can do.”
However, he cautioned, “It’s not going to be next year or five years from now. It’s really a grand challenge.”
Agility went public through a merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI, a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, led by financier Michael Klein. The deal valued Agility at $2.5 billion before the new investment and brought in about $465 million in gross proceeds. Its shares trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker AGLT.
After initially dipping below its opening price, the stock closed Thursday at $11.51, up 2.2%, bucking the trend on a day when the Nasdaq fell 5.5%, its worst day in 18 months.
Agility’s robot: The company’s main character is Digit, a two-legged robot with two arms mounted near the top of its torso that let it lift bins high and recover from falls. It moves totes and containers in warehouses and factories.
Digit 5, the latest version, was unveiled in September. Standing 5-foot-11 and weighing 284 pounds, it’s covered in sensors, with cameras and antennas in its head and safety-rated sensors in protective housings around its body. Agility says it can lift 50 pounds, reach 7.2 feet high and work more than 20 hours in a 24-hour day.
But the big advance is that Digit 5 was designed to work alongside people without a barrier. Earlier versions had to be fenced off from workers, which limited where customers could use them.
Agility learned how much that mattered at Amazon, an early investor in the company, which tested prior versions of Digit for moving and stacking bins in its warehouses.
Digit did useful work in tests there, Hurst said, but when Agility asked about scaling up, Amazon said it couldn’t deploy the robots. It showed Agility what it had taken to get its own wheeled robot through three to four years of safety certification, and said it didn’t know how a balancing robot would ever get there.
“The safety case to do this is unbelievably hard,” Hurst said. “Nobody has ever deployed a dynamically stable balancing machine, and it brings new risks.”
Getting a robot out from behind the barrier took years of engineering and standards work. Agility has been co-authoring ISO safety standards for the category and making its case to insurance companies and warehouse operators who want proof in numbers before putting a balancing machine next to a person.
Digit 5 uses AI and multiple sensors to watch for nearby people. Depending on the situation, it steers around them, stops or sits down. Visual and audio cues signal what it’s about to do, and a safety controller triggers its responses when someone gets too close.
Hurst credits the lessons from Amazon, along with ones from GXO, Toyota and Schaeffler, with shaping the design of Digit 5.
“Amazon was a huge, huge part of getting us to that point,” he said.
Amazon made an initial deposit in 2024 toward a $1.05 million purchase of five robots, according to Agility’s filings. Agility recorded about $1.04 million in net sales from Amazon in 2025, 58% of its total for the year. Hurst said he couldn’t speak to whether Amazon is a customer now.
With the safety improvements and other advancements, Hurst called Digit 5 “the scaling moment” for Agility. “That is the unlock,” he said.
One customer, which Agility has not named, has committed to a $300 million, three-year contract for 1,000 Digit 5 robots, according to its filings. The robots would be rented rather than sold, the commitment is subject to milestones and specifications, and the customer gets warrants that vest as the robots are deployed.
Agility has built about 10 Digit 5 robots, Hurst said, with the first prototypes just coming off the line. Its factory in Salem was built to eventually produce as many as 10,000 robots a year.
Financial picture: Agility’s business is still small, with revenue of $1.78 million last year and about $174,000 in the first six months of this year. It lost $362 million in the first half, up from $71.8 million a year earlier. Stock-based compensation, an accounting charge for employee equity awards, rose by about $252 million over the same period.
Agility had $14.7 million in cash at the end of June, before the deal closed, and management said in its interim financial statements that there was substantial doubt about the company’s ability to keep operating.
Hurst called the public markets his biggest unknown.
“I’m completely confident in our market path, our technological path,” he said. If public shareholders agree, he said, Agility will be able to “continue on this mission successfully and raise money when we need to.” If they doubt the company, “that’s going to make our life a lot harder.”
What Agility has that most rivals don’t is robots doing commercial work. As of May, its Digit 4 model had logged more than 65,000 hours across nine committed customer deployments, according to its filings. Digit 4 robots have moved more than 100,000 totes since June 2024 at a Georgia facility run by the logistics company GXO.
Investors have put far higher values on rivals still working largely in pilots, including Figure AI at a reported $39 billion, more than 15 times Agility’s valuation in the merger.
“Digit is doing real work in customer operations today, taking on repetitive, physically demanding tasks,” said Peggy Johnson, Agility’s CEO, in a statement. Going public, she said, gives the company more resources to put Digit into more workplaces.
Johnson became CEO in March 2024, when Hurst moved from CTO to chief robot officer. She previously ran Magic Leap, and before that spent six years as a Microsoft executive, leading business development and dealmaking under CEO Satya Nadella.
In an interview with GeekWire earlier in the week, Hurst took the long view on the stock listing, calling it a milestone on a much longer path. Treating a listing day as the achievement, he said, is a finance person’s frame: “I just don’t live in that world.”
From CMU to OSU: Hurst has been on that path for almost three decades.
He built his first walking robot in 1997, as a freshman at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He stayed at Carnegie Mellon for a Ph.D. in robotics, finishing in 2008, when fewer than 100 people in the world had earned one, he said.
That year he joined Oregon State University in Corvallis, planning from the start to eventually spin a company out of his research. In his Oregon State lab, Hurst’s team built ATRIAS, a two-legged robot that didn’t look like any animal because it was based on a mathematical model of walking and running. It was the first machine to reproduce the dynamics of human walking.
He started Agility in 2015 with Damion Shelton, a Carnegie Mellon classmate who was CEO until 2024, and Mikhail Jones, one of his Oregon State students, out of his lab there.
Being in Oregon helped from the start, Hurst said. Agility was almost alone in trying to build humanoid robots, and the engineers who moved to Oregon to join it were committed to that mission. The company had almost no turnover, unlike the Silicon Valley pattern of people jumping to a new job every six months.
But as it passed 400 employees, it needed experienced engineering managers, and Oregon had no robotics industry large enough to have produced them. Agility had been hiring those people in California and flying them north, so it opened an office there. Today Agility has offices in Pittsburgh and Fremont, Calif., in addition to Oregon.
Impact on jobs: For the time being, Agility pitches Digit as a way to fill jobs that are difficult to staff. Johnson told TechCrunch this week that the company has focused on “manual, very repetitive jobs, that it’s hard to find humans to do.”
Hurst calls the first commercial uses of the technology “step one” toward what he describes as the dream: “robots as part of everyday human life, doing the things people would rather not do.”
Asked what happens to the people whose work the robots replace, Hurst pointed to farming as an example of automation improving people’s lives.
“Early in American history, 90% of Americans worked in agriculture, and today 2% do,” he said. “And the only reason that’s true is because of automation.”
