This humanoid robotics company is going public, but its CEO isn’t promising a robot in your home anytime soon

Published 6 July 2026 · tech

The humanoid robotics market is awash in money right now. Last week, AI2 Robotics, a Shenzhen-based startup that makes wheeled humanoid robots, raised roughly $735

The humanoid robotics market is awash in money right now. Last week, AI2 Robotics, a Shenzhen-based startup that makes wheeled humanoid robots, raised roughly $735 million at a nearly $3 billion valuation. Earlier this year, Apptronik, an Austin-based maker of humanoid robots for manufacturing and logistics, closed a $935 million funding round valuing the company at more than $5.5 billion. Last fall, Figure AI, a San Jose-based startup developing general-purpose humanoid robots, self-reported that it closed on $1 billion in Series C funding at an eye-popping $39 billion valuation. By comparison, Peggy Johnson, CEO of Agility Robotics, is surprisingly measured. We spoke by phone last week, just after the company announced plans to go public through a merger with Michael Klein’s Churchill Capital Corp XI, a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. The deal values Agility at around $2.5 billion and is expected to raise more than $620 million in gross proceeds, the largest capital raise in humanoid robotics history. It hasn’t closed yet; the merger still needs shareholder approval and SEC review, and is expected to be completed later this year. Agility was founded in 2015 as a spinoff from Oregon State University. Based in Salem, Oregon, the company makes bipedal humanoid robots designed to work in warehouses and factories. Its SPAC maneuver is notable for a few reasons. It would make Agility the first pure-play humanoid robotics company to trade on public markets, giving retail investors direct exposure to a sector that has so far been available primarily to deep-pocketed VC funds. It also offers a rare window into the finances of a business in a space where most competitors closely guard their numbers and even the state of the tech they are building. Johnson — formerly executive vice president of business development at Microsoft, where she helped engineer the $26 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, and later CEO of Magic Leap, the once-hyped augmented reality headset maker — was careful throughout our conversation.

She declined to offer forward-looking financial guidance, declined to disclose the bill of materials for Agility’s flagship robot Digit, and pushed back politely whenever questions veered toward speculation. Asked why Agility is going public via a SPAC rather than raising another private round — a structure that skips the roadshow and pricing scrutiny of a traditional IPO — Johnson said much of it boils down to the first-mover advantage the company enjoys when it’s the first of its ilk to go public. For investors clamoring for shares in a buzzy robotics company, Agility is “an acceleration story and a timing story,” she said. The proceeds will also help Agility ramp up production at its 70,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Salem, Oregon, and fulfill an existing pipeline of customer orders. As for the troubled reputation of SPACs — many companies that went public that way in 2021 famously fizzled out entirely or trade well below their offering price — Johnson was unfazed. “If we just keep our head down, keep delivering customer by customer, robot by robot, we hopefully won’t experience the same volatility,” she said. “Our biggest competitor right now is just us. How quickly we can execute, how quickly we can continue to add new skills.” The pipeline goes well beyond pilots, Johnson told TechCrunch, pointing to more than $300 million in booked, multi-year revenue that represents roughly 1,000 robots that are part of a robots-as-a-service model in which customers pay a monthly fee rather than purchasing the machines outright. “Everybody on our list right now is already vetted, and they have deployment plans behind their proof of concepts,” Johnson said. Customers include GXO Logistics, Amazon, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, Schaeffler, and Mercado Libre. Digit itself is a deliberately unfussy piece of hardware.