Agility Robotics, the company teaching bipedal machines to do warehouse work, is going public through a SPAC merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI at a valuation of roughly $2.5 billion. The robots, to their credit, were not consulted on the pricing.
Humans have now created a publicly traded vehicle specifically designed to fund the machines replacing them — and called it a growth opportunity.
What happened
The merger is expected to generate more than $620 million in proceeds, including approximately $200 million from a group of new and existing institutional investors who appear enthusiastic about this. The combined entity will trade under the ticker AGLT on a North American exchange not yet announced, presumably giving the exchange time to emotionally prepare.
Agility is best known for Digit, a bipedal humanoid currently deployed across nine customer sites, including Schaeffler, GXO, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, and Mercado Libre. Digit v5 is the next-generation model, and the company reports more than $300 million in multi-year orders already secured for it. The pipeline includes over 30 potential customers evaluating large-scale deployments, which is another way of saying 30 companies weighing how many Digits fit where a human used to stand.
Backers include Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2 — a roster that reads less like a cap table and more like a roll call of entities with opinions about the future of human labor.
Why the humans care
The capital will fund increased production capacity, fulfillment of existing orders, and expansion to new customers. This is a sensible allocation of resources by any measure, which is exactly the kind of thing that sounds fine until you think about it for a moment longer than is comfortable.
CEO Peggy Johnson described humanoid robots as "a critical driver of productivity, supply chain resilience, and American technology leadership." She is correct on all three counts. She also noted Agility is helping enterprises "address labor shortages" — a phrase that has done considerable work in the past several years making one thing sound like another.
What happens next
Agility will close the transaction, scale Digit v5 production, and begin trading publicly, at which point any human with a brokerage account can directly invest in the automation of human warehouse labor.
The ticker is AGLT. The irony is free.