Agility Robotics Goes Public on Nasdaq, Opening Its Books on What a Rented Robot Really Costs

Agility Robotics, the Oregon company behind the bipedal warehouse robot Digit, began trading on the Nasdaq on Thursday under the ticker AGLT, becoming the first dedicated humanoid-robot developer to go public in the United States. The listing closed a merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI, a special-purpose acquisition company, in a deal that values the combined business at roughly $2.5 billion; warrants trade separately under the ticker AGLTW.

The merger required Agility to do something almost no rival has: open its books. Securities filings tied to the deal lay out, in granular detail, what it actually costs to rent or buy a humanoid robot — numbers that have mostly stayed private across a crowded field of well-funded startups.

What a robot costs, and what it's worth

Under Agility's "robots-as-a-service" subscription model, a customer pays about $25,000 upfront for delivery and setup, then $8,500 a month for software and maintenance. Buying a robot outright costs $200,000 in hardware plus $20,000 for deployment, with an annual service fee of $36,000. In filings reported by Ars Technica, Agility's chief financial officer, Michael Beer, told investors in October that the subscription model lets a customer swap $200,000 in annual labor costs for $100,000 in robot costs, while an outright purchase can replace $1.1 million in labor spending over five years with roughly $400,000 in robot costs.

Both versions buy access to Digit 5, the company's newest model, due to begin shipping to customers in 2027. It has swappable end-effector "hands," can lift loads up to 50 pounds, and can work more than 20 hours in a 24-hour period on a fast-charging battery, built with the UK firm Nyobolt, that takes nine minutes to deliver 90 minutes of runtime. An onboard sensor system lets it detect nearby workers and freeze or crouch to avoid collisions.

On the other side of the ledger, Agility says each robot costs it about $150,000 to build today, a figure it expects to fall to $75,000 at a production rate of 1,000 units a year and to $30,000 at 10,000 units a year. The company estimates it can eventually clear roughly $500,000 in annual revenue per robot under the subscription model and about $400,000 under the purchase model — margins that depend entirely on reaching a manufacturing scale it has not yet hit.

A crowded, unproven market

Agility's actual results so far illustrate the gap between that long-term math and the present: $1.8 million in revenue in 2025 against a $140 million operating loss. The filings bluntly state that the company "has incurred net losses since inception and expects to continue to incur operating and net losses for the foreseeable future."

Agility already has paying customers, including the logistics company GXO — its first customer, now expanding Digit deployments from a Georgia warehouse into North Carolina and Tennessee — as well as a Schaeffler factory in South Carolina and a Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada production line. The filings disclose a $300 million order from an unnamed customer for 1,000 Digit 5 units over a three-year subscription, though Agility cautions the revenue is contingent on hitting delivery milestones, not guaranteed.

The company's own risk disclosures acknowledge that "competition in the humanoid and robotics market is intensifying rapidly," naming Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Apptronik, Figure AI, 1X Technologies, Sanctuary AI, Hexagon and NEURA Robotics as rivals, several of which have deeper pockets and bigger brand recognition. China's Unitree took the same transparency leap in August, when it listed on Shanghai's STAR Market.

Jonathan Hurst, Agility's co-founder and chief robot officer, argues the market opportunity dwarfs the competition, pointing to what he calls "millions of unfilled roles" in manual labor that are expensive and hard to staff with people. He expects the novelty to wear off within a year, once customers are sharing videos of Digit robots "just very boringly doing their work."

It'll look a bit like the dawn of the automotive market, and different companies will have different niches — some companies will build the Ford F-150 and some companies will build a Mazda Miata.

Jonathan Hurst, Agility Robotics co-founder

Hurst has also tried to tamp down expectations that humanoid robots are coming for household chores anytime soon. "Digit 5 is not going to walk into your living room and do dishes and stuff like that," he said. "Nobody is." For now, Agility's listing gives Wall Street its first real window into whether warehouses and factories, not living rooms, can make the humanoid-robot business work — and investors will be watching its next earnings reports for signs the unit economics are moving in the right direction.