Almost a year ago to the day, Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock responded to some gentle social media taunting from rival robotics company Agility with a prediction: “You’ll be bankrupt in <12 months.”
Instead, Agility is going public through a reverse-merger that will see it become a publicly-traded company and raise $465 million in new capital from retail investors and a tranche of private funding. The transaction will take place through a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.
“You don’t see a lot of dancing robots or backflipping robots from Agility,” CEO Peggy Johnson told TechCrunch ahead of the company’s market debut. “We stuck to our strategy, which [are] these manual, very repetitive jobs, that it’s hard to find humans to do.”
Agility predates the recent boom in physical AI investment. The company was spun out of Oregon State University in 2015 by a group of researchers who made headway in figuring out how to get a robot to walk safely on two legs. The company has focused on deploying a handful of its Digit robots in industrial settings with nine different customers, including Schaeffler, GXO, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, and Mercado Libre. Digits are generally used to move heavy totes, including more than 100,000 of them at a GXO logistics facility.
Compared to humanoid robots built by Figure, Tesla, 1X, or Boston Dynamics, Agility’s Digit can seem plodding, but the robot is actually doing real work, and earning money — albeit just $174,000 in the first six months of 2026, and mostly from related parties.
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