Agility Robotics heads to Wall Street in a $2.5B bet on staffing warehouses with humanoids - Greenwich Time

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Agility Robotics heads to Wall Street in a $2.5B bet on staffing warehouses with humanoids

By MATT O'BRIEN, AP Technology Writer

A maker of humanlike robots that carry totes around warehouses is going 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.

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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 product line, 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.

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While Agility describes its 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.

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