In June, Agility Robotics announced more than $300 million in multi-year orders for its Digit humanoid, payable as the robots hit milestones written into the contracts. Its merger filing reports about $1.8 million in net sales for all of 2025. Robotics 24/7 set the two figures side by side on October 12 and was careful to say they cover different periods, since a conditional order is booked years before most of its revenue can arrive. What fills the distance between them is robots being delivered, installed and accepted on a customer's floor, and that is what I read for in any order announcement.
The analysis was written by Lars Talbert of The Robotic Life, which tracks humanoid companies, and he notes that order announcements now arrive weekly while counts of robots doing paid work arrive far less often. Humanoid makers shipped about 20,000 units in 2025, according to Bank of America figures reported by Reuters, but a shipped robot and a robot doing useful work on a customer's floor are separate milestones. Most readers get only the press release, and a press release can describe any of four things.
Four documents behind one headline
Talbert sorts them into four kinds, and they can overlap (a pilot sometimes comes with a purchase contract). A memorandum of understanding or letter of intent usually states an intention to cooperate and obliges nobody to pay. A framework agreement describes orders to come. The London startup named Humanoid announced one involving at least 1,000 robots for Schaeffler, alongside Bosch-backed production capacity for 100,000 units over five years. The 1,000 robots are the customer commitment. The 100,000 is factory capacity, a plan for output that no customer has bought.
A pilot shows sustained work on one task. Figure 02 logged more than 1,250 hours over an 11-month program at BMW's Spartanburg plant and loaded more than 90,000 parts before Figure retired it. A commercial deployment is the fourth kind, and Agility, the company with the $1.8 million year, has it: more than 65,000 operating hours across customers including GXO, Schaeffler and Toyota's Canadian plant.
What the number counts, and what has to happen first
A headline number can count units, dollars or factory capacity, and a capacity figure, as in the Humanoid deal, is a plan. A dollar figure with "up to" in front of it is a ceiling. A milestone clause means the customer pays in stages as the robot meets terms the contract spells out, and Agility's $300 million is written that way.
Dollar figures can also bundle more than robots. Reuters reported that UBTech won at least $123 million of fourth-quarter contracts with Chinese state-owned enterprises, about the same as its $122 million of humanoid revenue for all of 2025, and those contracts cover related technology as well as hardware and may be filled over time. Shipment forecasts need the same reading. Smart Analytics Global expects about 60,000 humanoid shipments this year, a count that includes small bipeds and wheeled machines alongside full-size robots. A shipment count measures hardware leaving a factory, and it can't tell anyone about productive hours, uptime or how often a person has to step in.
Who makes the robot work after the signature
A NEURA Robotics engineer told Talbert at Automate 2026 that systems integrators will be the main deployment channel for many humanoid makers. Integrators are the people who survey the site, wire the robot into the existing workflow and prove the economics to whoever pays. TechRepublic's illustrative figures for a Digit put the purchase price around $200,000 and five-year ownership near $400,000, so roughly half of what a customer spends on the robot comes after the sale, in integration, maintenance and support.
For a robotics founder, the milestones in a conditional order decide what that post-sale work has to deliver. Each one is a requirement the customer has priced: an uptime figure the buyer will measure, an intervention rate it will count, a support crew that has to exist the day the robot arrives. Before I looked at a feature list, I would pull the milestone schedule from the largest contract, lay it beside the roadmap and give each gate an owner, a test and a date.
Dave's take
Agility's 65,000 operating hours say more about its $300 million than the announcement did, because hours are what a customer keeps paying for once the robot is on the floor. I would want that count, and the number of robots accepted, in every order release I signed off on.
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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 →