Agility Robotics Built Its Name on Legs. Its Digit 5 Launch Showed Wheels.

Near the end of Agility Robotics' launch video for Digit 5, after minutes of a two-legged robot carrying totes, a humanoid on wheels appears. Agility has spent years arguing that legs suit buildings made for people. Jonathan Hurst, its CEO and chief robot officer, has spent decades studying how legs work. Asked about the wheels by The Robot Report, he confirmed Agility is exploring them and said it was too early to know whether they become a wheeled Digit or a different robot.

What the filings say about who Digit is for

Agility is going public through a merger with Churchill Capital Corp. XI at a $2.5 billion valuation, a deal expected to bring in more than $620 million. The filing reports $1.8 million of 2025 revenue against a $140 million operating loss, according to The Robot Report. It also cites more than $300 million in multi-year orders for Digit 5. GeekWire read the fine print on that number. All of it comes from one undisclosed customer, on a three-year contract for 1,000 robots, and it depends on Agility hitting milestones.

Whatever that customer's buildings look like, they will shape Digit for the next three years. Digit's published job is moving totes and tending machines in warehouses and factories, and the new version lifts up to 50 pounds. The Robot Report lays out the trade between the two designs. Legs earn their cost on stairs, curbs and clutter, while wheels are steadier, mechanically simpler and use less energy anywhere the ground is flat. Hurst expects legs to become the right solution for more applications as their safety and reliability improve, and in the meantime he wants approaches that put robots in more places sooner.

I keep landing in the same place on humanoids. They earn their keep where people and machines share a building nobody can redesign. Everywhere else, the robot that wins is built around the task. A tote run on level concrete sits close to that line, so a company this committed to legs has good reason to sketch wheels.

The knee went first

Agility has already given up one signature feature. Digit 5 dropped the backward-bending knees that people recognized earlier Digits by. The Robot Report read that change as a company willing to rethink even the fundamentals of its design. The wheeled rendering puts the legs themselves up for the same test.

The cheapest moment to argue with your own design

Look at the design decision your team is proudest of: the legs, the form factor on the first slide of the deck, the architecture somebody wrote a dissertation on. Is the customer paying for it, or is it how the team sees itself? Agility has now reopened two features, the knee in the product and the legs in the video, while annual revenue is under $2 million. The 1,000 robots on that contract are legged Digits, so that design is committed. The next product isn't yet, and it never gets cheaper to change than it is now. Every Digit that ships puts another set of leg actuators into a customer's building, and somebody has to stock the spare parts and train the technicians to fix them for as long as that robot runs.

One customer holding $300 million in milestone-dependent orders will steer the roadmap whether the company intends it to or not. If that customer's floors look like the rest of the market, the steering helps. If they don't, the company ends up building for one buyer. I read the wheels as Agility keeping a way open to sell to the buyers whose floors never needed legs.

Dave Saunders is the founder of Base Reality Group and a Fractional CPO for product companies. He was a founder and operator at Galen Robotics, where the surgical-robotics platform earned FDA De Novo authorization in 2023, and he managed a 35-patent portfolio licensed from Johns Hopkins. He wrote Founders Who Finish and publishes The Build. More about Dave →