The humanoid robotics market is awash with money right now. Last week, AI2 Robotics, a Shenzhen-based startup that makes wheeled humanoid robots, raised nearly $735 million at a valuation of nearly $3 billion. 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, backed by Google, Mercedes-Benz and John Deere, among others. Last fall, Figure AI, a San Jose-based startup that develops general-purpose humanoid robots, reported that it had closed $1 billion in Series C funding at a staggering $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 the history of humanoid robotics. It hasn’t closed yet; The merger still needs shareholder approval and SEC review, and is expected to be completed by the end of this year.

Agility was founded in 2015 as an affiliate of Oregon State University. Based in Salem, Oregon, the company makes bipedal humanoid robots designed to work in warehouses and factories. His move is notable for several reasons. It would make Agility the first purely humanoid robotics company to list on public markets, giving retail investors direct exposure to a sector that until now has been available primarily to deep-pocketed venture capital funds. It also offers a rare window into a company’s finances in a space where most competitors closely guard their numbers and even the state of the technology they are building.

Johnson, former 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 maker of augmented reality headsets, was careful throughout our conversation. He declined to offer forward-looking financial guidance, refused to disclose the bill of materials for Agility’s flagship robot, Digit, and politely declined whenever questions veered into speculation.

When asked why Agility is going public via a SPAC rather than launching another private round (a structure that skips the roadshow and pricing scrutiny of a traditional IPO), Johnson said much of this comes down to the first-mover advantage the company enjoys when it is the first of its kind to go public. For investors clamoring for shares of a buzzy robotics company, Agility is “an acceleration story and a timing story,” he said. Proceeds will also help Agility increase 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 either failed outright or traded well below their offering price — Johnson was unfazed. “If we just keep our heads down and continue to deliver customer by customer, robot by robot, hopefully we won’t experience the same volatility,” he said. “Our biggest competitor right now is simply us. How quickly we can execute, how quickly we can continue to add new skills.”

The project goes far beyond pilots, Johnson told TechCrunch, pointing to more than $300 million in multi-year revenue booked representing 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. “Everyone on our list right now has already been vetted and has implementation plans behind their proof of concepts,” Johnson said. Its clients include GXO Logistics, Amazon, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, Schaeffler and Mercado Libre.

Digit itself is a deliberately simple piece of hardware. It stands about 5’9″, weighs about 160 pounds, and is designed to do one thing exceptionally well: move heavy objects in human-built spaces. Its most distinctive feature is a set of reverse-flexed knees (they have been called “bird legs”) that allow it to reach from floor level to the upper shelves without the knees colliding with the warehouse shelves. (The founders of Agility, Johnson explained, were not interested in biomimicry for its own sake.) The robot’s hands (two thumbs and two fingers) are similarly task-specific; They are optimized to grip heavy plastic containers, even when their contents change during transport.

Johnson said Agility is “independent of LLM” and relies on models like Claude and Gemini to handle what she calls the semantic layer: translating high-level instructions into robot behavior. He described a recent test in which engineers spread different types of trash on the ground and told Digit to simply “clean up this mess.” The robot assessed, sorted and disposed of everything correctly, including correctly identifying the bubble wrap as non-recyclable.

Of course, it’s the physical layer (the mechanics of balance, locomotion, and manipulation) that Agility considers its main proprietary advantage, built over more than a decade of real-world implementation. “The LLMs had the entire Internet to train in,” he said. “When you think about the physical AI of humanoids, that doesn’t exist yet.” At least in most companies. Johnson believes Agility is the exception: “We may have the largest data lake of actual operational robotics in real-world environments.”

Beyond raw data, Johnson said, security is where the gulf between Agility and its competitors is largest and most consequential. While rival companies show off their robots in lab demonstrations and choreographed videos, Agility has had to meet actual industrial safety certification requirements to operate inside customers’ facilities. “You can’t build your robot and then make it secure,” he said. “That’s a redesign. You have to have all the safety certified: the electrical system, all the parts and the software to support all of that.” (It’s not a trivial concern given that humans are often somewhere in the room. In November, Figure AI’s former head of product safety sued the company, claiming he was fired after raising concerns that its robots were powerful enough to fracture a human skull. Figure has disputed the claims.)

As for the house, Johnson believes the humanoids will get there eventually, but said don’t expect them to bring you breakfast in bed anytime soon. It will be “more than 10 years,” he said of the timeline, noting that warehouses and factories, for all their complexity, have fixed aisles and predictable equipment and workflows, unlike homes that are chaotic, with dogs, babies, visitors and objects left in unexpected places.

“At least the roads have some discipline,” Johnson added, comparing the challenge to that of autonomous vehicles. “Most areas where humanoids will operate do not.”

Agility does not rule out the internal market. Johnson said the company will participate when it makes sense. For now, however, it is focused on the warehouse market, given the growing number of retiring workers and younger workers unwilling to take on physically demanding roles. “Today there are about a million unfilled jobs in the United States in these areas,” he said. “It’s very, very difficult to hire them.”