Agility's SPAC clears its vote, but robot deployment still trails the cash

Factory operators and logistics buyers can now buy humanoids from several vendors on flexible, pay-per-task terms. Public money is starting to price that promise.

Agility vote

What is still unknown is how fast deployment scales: Digit works in 9 customer environments today, and Agility's $300 million order book is multi-year and conditional, not revenue. Agility cleared its last big shareholder hurdle this week. More than 84% of votes cast at the 2 November special meeting backed the business combination. The SPAC is expected to close on 4 November, and the combined company should start trading on the Nasdaq on 5 November under the ticker AGLT. Churchill Capital stock finished up nearly 14% on 2 November. The money is smaller than the pitch. Agility expects about $465 million in gross capital before expenses, against the more than $620 million anticipated when the merger was announced in June. The original deal valued Agility at a $2.5 billion pre-money equity value.

That breaks into roughly $164 million from Churchill's trust account. A PIPE led by Foxconn adds $201 million, and Agility raised $100 million in equity after the initial announcement.

Nine sites

The deployment record is thinner than the capacity plan. Digit robots are running in 9 customer environments, with logistics and manufacturing as the main markets. GXO Logistics signed a multi-year Robots-as-a-Service deal in 2024 for its Flowery Branch, Ga. site. In October the two companies added Statesville, N.C., and Lebanon, Tenn., with deployments expected in early 2027 on Digit 4. AGCO signed a commercial agreement in October to pilot Digit at its Hesston, Kan. plant from 2027. Agility claims more than $300 million in committed multi-year orders for Digit 5. Early access comes in the first half of 2027, with general availability at the end of that year.

That order figure is not revenue. RoboFab in Salem, Ore. is designed for up to 10,000 robots a year.

Software bottleneck

Hardware is not the constraint founders talk about. Bleu Robotics, founded in Paris in December 2025, raised a €5 million pre-seed round. Contrarian Ventures and OVNI Capital co-led, with Kvanted, WEPA Ventures, Motier Ventures and Charlie Songhurst taking part. Bleu says its abductive learning model teaches a task from as few as ten operator demonstrations while holding 99%+ accuracy. The International Federation of Robotics counted 5 million industrial robots operating globally in 2025, but they repeat fixed tasks and cannot handle high-mix, low-volume production. Co-founder Benoît Berkoukchi said rivals train humanoids on millions of data points: "There isn't enough data on factory work".

The numbers behind that pitch are sobering. Interact Analysis found that of the 20,000-plus humanoids produced last year, only 10% reached real-world applications.

Tutor's model

Tutor Intelligence took a different route to the same problem. The Watertown, Mass. company, spun out of MIT CSAIL in 2021, raised $75 million in Series B funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing total capital to $117 million. It charges by the hour or by the pick rather than selling machines, with no upfront purchase and no long-term contract. Tutor says twice as many of its robots are working in almost four times as many facilities as a year ago. It expects more than 1,000 robots under contract by the end of 2027. Nearly a third of recent deliveries went to existing customers adding machines.

Market forecast

The forecast money is larger still. ResearchAndMarkets puts aerospace and defense factory automation at $8.8 billion in 2026, rising to $23.9 billion by 2036 at a 10.5% CAGR, from $8.0 billion in 2025. The report ties growth to aircraft order backlogs, higher defense spending and shortages of technicians, machinists, engineers and inspectors. Asia is working the same logic. At FIX 2026 in Daegu, South Korea, AeiROBOT showed its ALICE-M1 humanoid, and the country's working-age population has declined since 2020. The next markers are dated: the SPAC close on 4 November and Nasdaq trading on 5 November.