Digit has a real job and more warehouses are next
by https://www.facebook.com/vincentnguyen · The GadgeteerIf you buy something from a link in this article, we may earn a commission. Learn more
At a GXO warehouse in Flowery Branch, Georgia, one of the coworkers on the shift is a robot, and the deployment has moved more than 100,000 totes. Digit is built to human scale for buildings designed around people. It walks the aisles on two legs, picks up the plastic totes that flow through the fulfillment center, carries them across the floor, and sets them onto conveyors.
GXO pays for the work under a multi-year contract, one the two companies bill as the first formal commercial deployment of a humanoid robot in live operations and the first robots-as-a-service deal in the category. It isn’t a demo.
Agility Robotics, Digit’s maker, has closed its merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI and begun trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker AGLT on November 5, in a deal the companies call the first U.S. listing of a pure-play humanoid maker with commercial deployments already running. Churchill’s shareholders approved the combination on November 2, and the deal closed two days later.
Figure is still private money. Tesla’s Optimus answers to Tesla. Boston Dynamics answers to Hyundai.
The job is totes
The work itself is unglamorous. Warehouses run on tote moves, thousands of them a day, and Digit takes the repetitive end of the flow. GXO runs the fleet through Agility Arc, the cloud platform that manages the robots and wires them into the warehouse’s own systems. The relationship started as a late-2023 proof of concept, and the paid agreement followed in June 2024.
Across its commercial operations and customer programs, Digit has logged more than 65,000 hours.
Amazon, an early backer through its Industrial Innovation Fund, announced tote-recycling tests of Digit in 2023, the endless loop of picking up empty totes once pickers have emptied them. Toyota’s Canadian manufacturing arm signed a commercial agreement after a successful pilot.
AGCO has signed for a pilot at its Hesston, Kansas plant, with Digit planned to handle parts work in farm-equipment production from 2027.
Digit 5 is designed to work beside people
Digit 5 is the next machine, and the new money builds it. Digit 5, unveiled on September 15, is designed for up to a 50-pound payload and a 7.2-foot reach. Agility specs a 20-hour workday built from short work cycles, about 90 minutes of runtime against 9 minutes of charging. Its defining feature is cooperative safety: human detection and safety behaviors designed to let it share floor space with people instead of running behind external barriers.
Digit 5 is still in development. Agility’s own footnotes call the specs preliminary estimates from pre-production testing, with some safety features still in development.
Agility says it holds more than $300 million in committed multi-year orders for Digit 5. In its own filing, the company qualifies that figure in plain terms: it’s potential value over time, tied to contractual milestones and to the machine hitting its planned specs, not current revenue.
Early access is planned for the first half of 2027. General availability is targeted for the end of that year.
What the public money buys
The deal was expected to bring in roughly $465 million in combined gross financing before transaction expenses: about $164 million from the Churchill Capital XI trust, $201 million from a PIPE led by Foxconn at $10 a share, and $100 million already received in July.
Foxconn led that PIPE. It’s the world’s largest contract manufacturer, and it’s paying to stand behind the humanoid supply chain.
GXO plans to add Digit at two more U.S. warehouses, in Statesville, North Carolina, and Lebanon, Tennessee, starting in early 2027, first on the current Digit 4 and then migrating to Digit 5. Behind the deployments sits RoboFab, Agility’s 70,000-square-foot plant in Salem, Oregon, designed for annual production capacity of up to 10,000 robots, plus a pipeline of more than 30 prospective customers across manufacturing, automotive, aerospace, defense, logistics, and consumer products.
The filing shows the harder numbers
Agility’s sales for 2025 came to $1.8 million. Two customers accounted for $1.55 million of that total, and $1.1 million of it was related-party revenue, an investor buying robots. The accumulated deficit stood at $675 million by mid-2026, and cash on hand was $14.7 million at June 30, before July’s $100 million SAFE financing landed.
The gap between $1.8 million in sales and a public listing is the risk in the deal.
The company states in its own filing that it expects to keep losing money for the foreseeable future. The roughly 7,000 robots the valuation counts in the field by 2030 are an OceanTomo assumption in that filing, a model input for tote handling, not a promised delivery schedule.
The order book, the GXO expansion, and the Foxconn money say the customers and the supply chain believe it. The income statement says it hasn’t happened yet.
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