Agility's $2.5B SPAC and $300M Order: Can Digit 5 Reach a $30k Cost?

Agility Robotics plans to go public through a merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI at a $2.5 billion pre-money equity value, and says it holds more than $300 million in multi-year Digit v5 orders. The $30,000 in the headline is not a price. It is a parts-cost target for Digit 5 at 10,000 units a year, versus about $150,000 at commercial launch, according to a summary of management's 6 October 2026 investor-day remarks.

Everything below is company-stated unless noted. No independent test of Digit 5 has been published, and Digit 5 has not yet shipped to customers (figures as of 12 October 2026).

What is Digit 5?

Digit 5 (also written Digit v5) is the next version of Agility's bipedal warehouse and factory humanoid. The company says it is designed to be the first cooperatively safe humanoid, meaning it can work near people instead of inside a fenced cell.

In plain terms: today's Digit moves totes in segregated areas. Digit 5 is meant to leave the cage. That is the product's core bet, and it is still being validated.

What is Agility's thesis?

Agility's co-founder Jonathan Hurst said in The Robot Report's coverage that "safety is the biggest blocker to adoption" learned from commercial deployments. Digit 5 is built around that view.

The company is also pursuing near-term, narrow work (moving totes) rather than general-purpose home robots. Digit has logged more than 65,000 hours across nine customer facilities, with Schaeffler, GXO, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada and Mercado Libre named as customers.

How is Agility funded, and how does the SPAC work?

The SPAC is expected to deliver more than $620 million in gross proceeds: $420 million held in Churchill XI's trust (assuming no redemptions) plus about $200 million from a PIPE committed at $10 per share and led by Foxconn. The combined company is expected to trade as AGLT. Closing is expected in 2026, subject to shareholder approval, SEC review of the Form S-4, and exchange listing approval.

All existing Agility shareholders roll their equity into the new company, with a 180-day lockup. Strategic investors named in the release are DCVC, NVIDIA, Amazon, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Foxconn, Schaeffler, Abico and Playground Global. Peggy Johnson is CEO.

How big is the $300M order, really?

Agility says it has more than $300 million in multi-year Digit v5 orders, "subject to the realization of certain contractual milestones." The press release gives no customer name or robot count.

The S-4 adds detail. According to Invest Deeptech's reading of the filing, the order is a single three-year robots-as-a-service contract for 1,000 Digit v5 robots. The buyer is also a related party and is unnamed. Agility would issue 453 warrants per robot sourced if the customer sources at least 1,000, and the company was still evaluating the accounting. The Robot Report likewise describes the orders as coming from one customer.

What does Digit 5 cost to buy or rent?

No price list exists. The S-4's modeling assumptions, as reported by The Robot Report (as of 7 September 2026), are:

Under the purchase model, Agility assumes about $400,000 of revenue per robot over five years. Under RaaS it assumes about $535,000. Let's Data Science carries the same figures, which are company assumptions rather than quoted prices; treat the fees as approximate.

Can Digit 5 reach a $30,000 cost?

Possibly, but only at a scale Agility has not reached. The investor-day summary says management put the Digit 5 bill of materials at about $30,000 per unit at 10,000 units a year, down from $150,000 at commercial launch. That is an 80% reduction. In June, CFO and COO Jennifer Hunter said Digit v4's bill of materials is $125,000, to fall as volumes rise.

Three limits matter:

• It is parts cost, not price or full cost. Labor, warranty, deployment and software are separate.
• The volume is far off. RoboFab in Salem is designed for up to 10,000 units annually, but the S-4 projects only around 800 Digit v5 units in 2027, 7,000 by 2030 and up to 25,000 by 2035.
• The $30,000 is a management target, stated at the investor day, not a result Agility has achieved.

What are Digit 5's specifications?

Forbes' account in the Form 425 adds a 90-minute battery with a nine-minute charge, which is how a 10:1 run-to-charge ratio produces the roughly 20 working hours a day.

What is new compared with Digit 4?

Safety architecture is the main change; payload and reach are secondary. Digit became the first humanoid to pass a field evaluation by a Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratory in November 2025, according to Forbes, but that was specific to one site's configuration and not a blanket approval.

For Digit 5, Agility says it will use NVIDIA's Halos AI Systems Inspection Lab to shorten the path to third-party certification. It is also contributing to ISO 25785-1, which is still a committee draft, so no final humanoid safety standard exists to certify against yet.

Where will people actually use it?

The named uses are warehouse and factory tote handling. Digit moved more than 100,000 totes for GXO last year, according to The Robot Report. Customers named so far are logistics and manufacturing operators: GXO, Schaeffler, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada and Mercado Libre. Agility reports a pipeline of more than 30 customers.

The cooperative-safety goal would extend this to floors where people and robots share aisles, rather than robot-only zones.

What's still unclear?

• Revenue versus ambition. Agility reported about $1.8 million of 2025 net sales against a $140 million operating loss. Invest Deeptech reports that most of the revenue came from related parties and that the S-4 notes say substantial doubt exists about continuing as a going concern.
• Order concentration. One related-party customer, milestone conditions, and unresolved warrant accounting mean $300 million is not booked revenue.
• Timeline. Early access in the first half of 2027 and general availability by the end of 2027 are company targets, and the product has not shipped.
• Cost path. The $30,000 figure assumes 10,000 units a year, which is more than the S-4's own 2027 and 2030 unit projections.
• Safety proof. Cooperative safety for Digit 5 is a design intent with certification still ahead.

Should you wait or watch?

Digit 5 is an enterprise product, so there is nothing to buy. For industry watchers, the signals to track are the S-4 effectiveness and close, the first early-adopter deliveries in the first half of 2027, any third-party safety certificate for Digit 5, and whether the unit projections are met. The headline test is simple: if volume does not approach 10,000 a year, the $30,000 parts cost does not arrive.