Agility Robotics, a maker of humanlike robots, is going public on Wall Street #
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A maker of humanlike robots that carry totes around warehouses is aiming to go public on Wall Street in a test of whether there's a market for putting AI-powered humanoid machines to work.
Agility Robotics, based in Salem, Oregon, announced Wednesday a planned merger with an investment firm that will value the company at $2.5 billion as it becomes the first publicly traded company entirely devoted to building and selling humanoids.
Its competitors include Tesla, whose CEO Elon Musk has pitched its humanoid prototype Optimus as the future of the carmaker. Designed to pick up and move heavy bins and totes, Agility's flagship product, called Digit, is the “first humanoid robot employed and commercially operational in warehouse and industrial facilities,” said Michael Klein, co-founder and chairman of Churchill Capital Group, which runs the special-purpose acquisition company that intends to merge with Agility by the end of the year.
Klein said on an investor call Wednesday that the company has backing from Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank and Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn. Its early customers include Toyota, industrial parts supplier Schaeffler, and Mercado Libre, the Latin American e-commerce giant.
While Agility describes its fully autonomous robot as a humanoid, the company's co-founder and chief robot officer Jonathan Hurst told investors Wednesday that “we’ve never set out to build a machine that looks like a person.” Unlike other humanoids, like Tesla's Optimus, Digit's legs are more birdlike than human in a design that's meant to better fit the work they do. Its hands are more like grippers or claws. Agility CEO Peggy Johnson said Digit specializes in manual labor that for humans would be repetitive, dirty and prone to injury.
“The demand here is large and increasing,” she said on the investor call. “We have companies reshoring production, older workers retiring, and younger generations just not opting for these types of menial jobs.”
While earlier generations of industrial robots are typically so large and fast-moving that they must be fenced off from human workers, Hurst said upcoming versions of Digit will be able to work alongside humans in warehouses and manufacturing facilities. In the years to come, they could eventually find their way into hospitality, home services and elder care, he said. Agility's plan to merge with Churchill's special-purpose acquisition company, known as a SPAC, provides a quicker timeline for going public and fewer disclosure requirements.
Johnson said the company will use the capital it raises to expand commercial deployments and scale production of its next robot model, Digit V5. It will be the fifth generation in a line of two-legged robots Agility first unveiled nearly a decade ago after spinning off from a robotics laboratory at Oregon State University.