Agility unveils Digit 5 as it pitches a $2.5B pre-money valuation

Why it matters

Agility's plan pairs Digit 5's 2027 customer rollout with a proposed listing carrying a $2.5B pre-money valuation. Its safety performance and production ramp will test whether factory pilots can become repeatable commercial deployments.

Agility Robotics, founded by Jonathan Hurst, Damion Shelton and Mikhail Jones, unveiled Digit 5 on September 15th, presenting a stronger, faster-charging humanoid designed to work near people without the protective barriers common around industrial robots.

Hurst earned bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, then founded Oregon State University's Dynamic Robotics Lab. Jones co-authored work on robust 3D gait control for ATRIAS, an early biped from the lab, and was later credited with implementing the controller and running experiments. Agility was established in 2015, and Agility says Shelton served as CEO from its inception until Peggy Johnson took the role in March 2024.

Shelton previously co-founded 3D-imaging developer threeRivers 3D, which was acquired in 2012. He became executive director of Carnegie Mellon's Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship in August. Hurst remains Agility's chief robot officer, keeping a founder close to the machine's technical direction as Johnson handles the customer rollout and the transaction that Agility said in June it had agreed with Churchill Capital Corp XI.

Johnson took over Agility in 2024 after serving as Magic Leap's CEO. Before Magic Leap, she spent six years running business development at Microsoft and 24 years in leadership roles at Qualcomm. Digit 5 gives her a familiar assignment: turn expensive, research-heavy hardware into an industrial product with repeatable deployments.

The safety bet

Digit 5's defining feature is a new safety architecture intended to let the robot leave fenced work cells and operate closer to employees. Multiple sensors feed Agility's human-detection software, which can direct Digit to avoid a person, stop or lower itself into a seated position. Visual and auditory cues communicate intended movement, while an independent safety controller can intervene when a person gets too close.

Agility is NVIDIA's first humanoid launch partner for Halos for Robotics, pairing Digit's safety architecture with NVIDIA IGX Thor and Halos Core infrastructure.

Agility says the previous Digit became the first humanoid to pass an independent field evaluation on a customer production line against industrial safety requirements administered by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Agility is also contributing to the ANSI/A3 technical report being developed for dynamically stable industrial mobile robots and ISO 25785-1, an international humanoid safety standard. Those standards matter because industrial buyers need a repeatable basis for assessing a 284-pound autonomous machine moving around employees, equipment and inventory.

Safety has been central to Hurst's approach for years. In an August essay on physical AI, he argued that software remains constrained by the machine executing it.

Nine minutes at the charger

Agility says Digit 5 can repeatedly lift 50 pounds, a 40% payload increase from Digit 4. A revised leg design uses Agility's cycloidal actuators to handle repetitive lifting, while interchangeable grippers attach through ISO-standard mounting flanges.

The company says the battery runs for 90 minutes and is designed to recharge autonomously in nine minutes. Agility calculates that the 10:1 run-to-charge ratio can support over 20 productive hours in a 24-hour period, compared with Digit 4's 2:1 ratio. Digit 5 stands 5 feet 11 inches and can reach 7.2 feet, allowing it to access equipment and shelving intended for human workers.

Those specifications support a wider product pitch than the tote-moving work that has dominated earlier Digit deployments. Agility plans to train Digit 5 for depalletizing, machine tending, kitting, sequencing, inspection and palletizing. Agility Arc, its cloud-based fleet platform, is intended to coordinate handoffs with conveyors, autonomous mobile robots and warehouse-management systems.

Most of that broader workflow remains a 2027 proposition. Agility expects early access during the first half of 2027 and general availability by the end of that year. The September 15th launch supplies the hardware specifications; customer deployments will establish how many of those planned tasks can run reliably through a full shift.

The $300M order figure needs its footnote

Agility said it had more than $300 million in multi-year Digit 5 customer orders as of May 2026, subject to satisfaction of certain contractual milestones. The figure was already part of Agility's public-market pitch in May and does not represent business booked around the September 15th unveiling.

Agility has not identified the customers or disclosed the individual contract terms behind that total. The company's SEC-filed presentation describes the figure as potential multi-year value associated with 1,000 robots under three-year robot-as-a-service contracts, rather than current-period revenue.

The disclosure provides evidence of customer commitments, though the omissions limit what outsiders can infer about deployment timing. Agility must still manufacture the robots, satisfy the contractual milestones and keep deployed fleets productive as Digit 5 moves toward commercial availability.

Agility says Digit 4 has accumulated more than 65,000 operating hours across nine customer facilities. At GXO's Flowery Branch, Georgia, operation, Agility reported that Digit moved more than 100,000 totes with about 98% accuracy while on task. These remain Agility-supplied metrics, and they cover a narrower material-handling job than the facility-wide workflows promised for Digit 5.

A product launch inside a public-market campaign

Agility said in June that it had entered a definitive business combination agreement with Churchill Capital Corp. XI, assigning the robotics company a $2.5 billion pre-money equity value. The transaction had not closed as of September 15th. Churchill's Form S-4 registration statement was filed and accepted by the SEC on September 4th, 11 calendar days before the launch.

According to Agility's merger announcement, the transaction is expected to provide more than $620 million in gross proceeds. Agility said it plans to use the proceeds to fulfill orders, expand deployments and increase Digit 5 production.

RuntimeWire reported in August that Johnson was pitching the $300 million order figure and Agility's deployment history as support for that valuation. The new robot puts specifications behind the pitch: a 50-pound payload, faster charging, expanded tools and a safety system designed to reduce dependence on protective barriers.

Agility's Salem, Oregon, RoboFab facility is designed for peak production of 10,000 robots a year. Agility says about 75% of Digit's nearly 6,000 parts are sourced in the United States. Designed capacity does not establish production volume, but the factory gives Agility direct control over an unusually complex supply chain as it prepares to fill its multi-year Digit 5 orders.

Warehouses and factories offer repetitive jobs, controlled workflows and customers able to measure throughput. The operating data can then support new skills and deployments in less structured environments.

Digit 5 puts Agility's industrial strategy under a commercial deadline. Agility has to prove that a humanoid can work outside a fenced cell, move beyond one tote-handling task and remain productive through long operating periods. The hardware is scheduled to reach customers next year. The public-market transaction asks investors to fund the manufacturing system that comes with it.