Agility clears the SEC for a Nasdaq listing — and opens the first real set of books in the Western humanoid business.

On October 13 the Securities and Exchange Commission declared effective the joint registration statement behind Agility Robotics' merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI, the blank-check company taking it public. Churchill XI shareholders vote on the deal November 2, the combination is expected to close in November, and the merged company will trade on Nasdaq under the ticker AGLT — billed as the only US-listed pure-play humanoid company with proven, active commercial deployments. The transaction values Agility at a pre-money equity value of $2.5 billion and is expected to provide more than $620 million of gross proceeds: roughly $424 million from Churchill XI's trust, assuming no shareholder redemptions, plus about $200 million from a private placement led by Foxconn at $10 a share. The money is earmarked to fulfill existing orders, expand deployments and scale production of Digit 5. More than the cash, the listing matters because it forces disclosure: for the first time a Western pure-play humanoid maker has to open audited books, rather than letting a demo reel stand in for a business.

Those books, previewed at an October 6 Analyst and Investor Day, are a useful antidote to the category's hype. Digit 5 will cost about $150,000 in parts at launch — above the roughly $125,000 it costs to build today's Digit 4 — because, as co-founder and chief robot officer Jonathan Hurst put it, there is 'a lot more robot in that robot': the safety sensors and computing needed to work near people make it bigger and heavier. Agility targets $30,000 per unit at 10,000 units a year. Under its Robot-as-a-Service model, chief financial officer Michael Beer said a Digit generates about $500,000 over an assumed five-year life — an annual subscription plus a roughly $25,000 deployment fee — against about $240,000 of cost, for a product margin near 50% and hardware payback in about 18 months. Margins reach roughly 70% with sub-one-year payback at 1,000 units a year, and about 75% at 10,000, assuming no price increases. For scale, Agility reported just $1.78 million of revenue in 2025.

The headline order deserves the same scrutiny. Agility's much-cited '$300 million, 1,000-robot' Digit 5 commitment is not a backlog that converts on a schedule; it unlocks in tranches, with each use case the robot proves releasing a new batch. Chief business officer Daniel Diez described it bluntly: 'The robot is required to be able to perform certain use cases. And each use case unlocks new tranches of robots,' with throughput targets negotiated per task and the customer — an unnamed related party receiving warrants that vest as robots deploy — taking 'three years of service over a four-year period.' Chief executive Peggy Johnson framed the orders as subject to 'contractual milestones, product features, and specifications.' The timeline has slipped, too: general availability is now described as end of 2027 'and early 2028,' with early-access units in the first half of 2027, where the earlier filing had pointed to an initial release in late 2026. The RaaS fleet will be funded with sub-10% debt once the company is public. And Digit remains caged — a Schaeffler engineer said the company still has to guard every humanoid it runs until robots are certified to emerging ISO safety standards, and Schaeffler is not exclusive to Agility, having also committed to 1,000 Hexagon AEON units and thousands of NEURA robots.

For a procurement team, this is the most valuable disclosure the sector has produced — precisely because going public compelled it. Read plainly: the most-deployed Western industrial humanoid still booked under $2 million of revenue last year, costs about $150,000 to build, carries a lease bill around $100,000 a year, and will not be generally available until late 2027 or early 2028 — and even its marquee order pays out only as Digit proves tasks one at a time, with the robot fenced off from workers until safety certification lands. That is not a knock; it is the clearest baseline anyone building a shortlist has had, and it is far more honest than a valuation headline. The things to watch after the November 2 vote are concrete: how quickly those milestone tranches turn into deployed robots, whether the promised cost-down from $150,000 toward $30,000 and the cheap debt actually materialize, and whether Digit 5 earns the certification that finally lets it out of the cage.