Getting in early is possible because Agility is coming to market via a SPAC, a publicly traded shell that raises money and then looks for a company to merge with to take it public. Agility's SPAC is called Churchill Capital Corp XI and it is already trading on Nasdaq. That is where everything is decided: buying the stock today effectively means buying the future Agility shares if the merger goes through. The structure even includes a safety net, the SPAC holds a $420m trust account, and any shareholder who prefers to exit before the merger can redeem their stake, about $10 per share, according to the prospectus.

Foxconn, meanwhile, is not lining up with you. The Taiwanese contract manufacturer that assembles iPhones, along with a handful of institutional investors, is injecting about $200m directly into the deal. In the jargon, that is a PIPE, a private investment in public equity, buying shares privately rather than through the market. Their shares will be delivered on the merger date, priced at $10 each, a level set in the June 24 release. You, on the other hand, are buying in the market, which is asking close to $13 today for the same eventual claim. A $3 gap. Against that premium, the pitch offers a commercial promise: more than $300m in orders. It rests on a single contract, and the buyer is not named anywhere.

65,000 hours on the clock

Digit moves bins and feeds production lines at German auto supplier Schaeffler, logistics group GXO, Toyota in Canada, and Latin American e-commerce giant Mercado Libre. More than 65,000 cumulative operating hours across 9 customer sites, according to the deal announcement. And those hours are valuable. They were logged at active customer operations, where a robot does not get in without clearing safety audits. Digit crossed a meaningful milestone last November: an inspection by a lab recognized by OSHA, the US federal workplace safety agency, conducted at an operating logistics site. Agility calls it a first for its sector, even if the validation applies only to that site.

That is the ground on which CEO Peggy Johnson, who has led the company since 2024 after Microsoft and Magic Leap, draws a contrast with competitors. At Tesla, Elon Musk acknowledged on January 28, during the 2025 fourth-quarter earnings call, that Optimus was still in the research phase and was not being used in any meaningful way in Tesla's own factories, according to Electrek. Still, all of that concerns Digit v4, the machine working today. The price of this deal, however, hinges on the next one.


Source: Agility Robotics press kit

The missing name in the file

The $300m, in fact, relates to Digit v5, the next generation of the robot, and the release is careful to note that it is subject to contractual milestones. Behind the jargon, it is simple: a milestone is a step that must be cleared before the money is earned. The promise is ambitious. A traditional industrial robot typically works inside a protected cell, forcing the site to be organized around it. Agility designed v5 to work alongside employees, without barriers. Remove that constraint, and the number of sites able to host the machine expands dramatically. For now, v5 remains a commercial promise.

Its CEO does not bother with that caution. Speaking to TechCrunch, Peggy Johnson goes so far as to describe it as contracted revenue, about 1,000 robots leased on subscription. Add the term found by GeekWire in filings with the US regulator, 3 years, and the math is quick: something like $100k per robot per year. The exact price is not published anywhere, but the order of magnitude is clear. You still have to know who is signing the check.

Nobody does. The documents, less emphatic than the CEO, specify that the $300m does not measure revenue for the period, and that it comes primarily from a single contract whose customer is not identified. None of the customers already mentioned is designated as the buyer.

And it is not the only gray area in the file. Johnson declined to give TechCrunch any guidance, and to disclose the full cost of v5. What we know about the numbers comes down to two figures: $111m in operating expenses in 2025 versus $71m a year earlier, and close to $100m in cash burn, all preliminary and unaudited. If that contract falls apart, or if v5 misses its milestones, the valuation loses the only disclosed order figure that gives it a footing.

A factory for 10,000 robots, a contract for 1,000

The transaction is expected to bring Agility more than $620m, according to the June 24 release, assuming SPAC shareholders do not redeem en masse. That is a gross amount, from which you still have to subtract the banker and lawyer fees these mergers consume. The $420m trust account is the bulk of it, topped up by roughly $200m from the Foxconn-led PIPE. With that money, Agility needs to manufacture, and its stated capacity is eye-catching. The Salem factory is designed to produce up to 10,000 robots per year. The only quantified contract covers 1,000, one-tenth of that theoretical annual capacity.

One last number to gauge what you are buying. The $2.5bn is not the value of the future listed company. It is the pre-money valuation, the price assigned to what Agility's current shareholders contribute, before new cash comes in. But the listed company will have more shareholders than them. The investor presentation assumes 336.3 million shares outstanding after the merger, adding in the SPAC shares, the PIPE, and the impact of incentive plans. Multiply by the current price and you land around a $4.3bn market cap. That figure should be handled with care: today's price is being set on a fraction of the future equity, and the deal is not closed. But the premium is already there. Foxconn is committing at $10 per share. Wall Street is asking close to $13.

Next in this series: my colleague Capucine Bouchard's picks, three listed stocks to play the humanoid theme. For the most impatient readers, see our thematic lists Robotics and Artificial Intelligence.

https://www.marketscreener.com/news/agility-robotics-4bn-valuation-and-a-300m-mystery-ce7f50dbdd80f62c