Agility Robotics, the Oregon startup behind the bipedal Digit robot, is in talks to go public through a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company in a deal valuing it at about $2.5bn, according to Wall Street Journal.
The terms have not been confirmed, the SPAC partner has not been named, and the company has not commented publicly, so the figure should be read as a report of negotiations rather than a closed transaction.
Either way, the implied valuation would mark a step up from where Agility last priced itself in private markets.
The company closed a $400m Series C in March 2025 at a valuation of about $2.12bn, and has raised more than $640m in total across its funding history.
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A SPAC merger at $2.5bn to $3bn would put a public-market premium on a company whose core selling point is that its robot actually works for paying customers.
That is the claim Agility leans on hardest. Digit, the 1.75-metre humanoid that spun out of Oregon State University, has been the rare humanoid to generate revenue from commercial deployments rather than demo reels, moving more than 100,000 totes in a GXO Logistics warehouse and signing a multi-year robots-as-a-service contract.
Amazon’s Industrial Innovation Fund made an early growth investment, a signal of interest from the largest potential buyer of warehouse labour automation in the world.
The robots-as-a-service model is central to the pitch. Rather than selling the hardware outright, Agility rents Digit to logistics operators on a subscription basis, an arrangement meant to lower the barrier to adoption and give the company recurring revenue rather than one-off sales.
Agility has positioned Digit for repetitive warehouse tasks such as moving totes between conveyors and storage, the sort of work that is dull, physically taxing and chronically hard to staff.
The route Agility is reportedly taking is itself notable. Most of the best-capitalised humanoid companies have stayed private and raised eye-watering sums to do it. F
igure AI carries a private valuation in the tens of billions, and China’s Unitree has filed for an IPO worth a reported $7bn after outselling Tesla on humanoid units.
A SPAC, by contrast, is the faster and historically more forgiving path to public markets, the same mechanism that floated a wave of speculative hardware companies during the 2021 boom, not all of which survived contact with public scrutiny.
The backdrop is a sector awash in capital and short on revenue. Global investment in robotics and physical AI reached $27.6bn in 2025, more than double the previous year, and the money has flowed to companies at wildly different stages of actually selling anything.
Some of that has gone to humanoids; some has gone to firms arguing the form factor is wrong, such as wheeled-robot makers who think legs are an expensive distraction.
China’s own humanoid boom is already running into a commercialisation reality check, with roughly 150 companies chasing a market where most buyers say they are not yet satisfied.
Against that, Agility’s pitch to public investors would be deployment over demos: a robot earning money in warehouses, a marquee logistics customer, and an Amazon connection.
Whether that is enough to support a multi-billion-dollar public listing, and whether the valuation lands at $2.5bn, $3bn or somewhere a filing eventually settles on, is what the coming weeks will clarify.
For now, the company has neither confirmed the talks nor named the vehicle.
