Early on, when Digit was moving bins for Amazon, Agility Robotics asked how many robots Amazon would like to buy. Jonathan Hurst, Agility’s co-founder and chief robot officer, told The Robot Report that the question exposed what stood between a working robot and a fleet: FCC rules, UL and ISO safety certifications, and the layout of the customer’s building. On November 5 Agility started trading on Nasdaq as AGLT. It says it holds more than $300 million in committed multiyear orders for its next robot, Digit 5, and that those orders are subject to contractual milestones and product specifications. I read that backlog as a specification with money behind it, payable once Agility meets it.
A small revenue line and a conditional backlog
Shares opened above the $10 SPAC price, and the merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI raised about $465 million before expenses. Revenue is far smaller. Agility booked $1.78 million in 2025, up from $310,000 the year before, against a net loss of $138.1 million, and about 64 percent of that revenue came from related parties.
The $300 million is far larger than anything Agility has sold so far, and it’s tied to a robot no customer has yet. Digit 5 goes to early-access customers in the first half of 2027, with general availability planned by the end of that year. Its predecessor, Digit 4, has spent three years on customer floors, and Digit robots have logged more than 65,000 hours across nine sites.
Where Digit 5’s requirements came from
CEO Peggy Johnson said Digit 5 was built to the exact requirements customers gave Agility after those three years. Hurst described the raw material: aisle widths, places to bolt down a charger, the workflow around the robot. Those constraints became hundreds of engineering requirements, and he said designing a robot from that kind of list was new for the company.
Some of those requirements show up as numbers. Digit 5 can repeatedly lift 50 pounds, which Hurst said covers single-person lifts in OSHA-regulated facilities. Digit 4 needed a minute of charging for every two minutes of work; Digit 5 needs one for every ten.
Agility also says Digit 5 can work close to people without the physical safety barriers that keep most industrial humanoids roped off. When a person comes close, Digit 5 slows, stops, and can sit down and cut power to its motors, while an independent safety controller monitors that response. Hurst draws a distinction between a team believing its robot is safe and a robot passing the industrial standards process meant to protect people who don’t know the machine. Agility also expects Digit 5 to carry a CE mark, which it needs for its first deployments outside North America, starting in the EU and UK.
Agility hasn’t published its contract terms or said which milestones apply to which orders. Read plainly, an order subject to product specifications can give the buyer room to delay or renegotiate if the delivered robot falls short of them.
Reading your own early orders
Early hardware orders often come with conditions of their own, written into a pilot conversion or a design partner’s purchase order. The question I’d put to each one is what has to be true about the product on delivery day for the money to arrive. When the answer is a list of measurable requirements, the company knows what it’s building. When the answer is that the customer liked the demo, the order is still a sales conversation.
Those conditions belong in your requirements before a contract writes them for you, because a requirement traced from a customer constraint to a test to a certificate is one a team can plan around. Medical device teams keep that trace under design controls, since an FDA reviewer checks the device against its claims. A buyer accepting a delivered robot against its specifications is doing a version of that check.
Agility’s revenue so far is small, but the company did the work that turns a demo into a product: it asked customers what the robot had to do and wrote the answers down as requirements. Digit 5 is aimed where I think humanoids earn their keep, beside people in spaces built for people. Whether the $300 million becomes revenue depends on what 2027 test reports and certification files say.
From Dave’s video library
Dave on timing a build by proof from a paying buyer, with Zume's pizza robots as the cautionary case.
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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 →