The woman who bought LinkedIn now rents out robots

The humanoid that promises the least is the first that will show its books in America. And the person taking it to the trading floor doesn't come from robotics: she comes from closing one of the biggest acquisitions in software history.

On June 24, Agility Robotics announced it would go public through the door Wall Street reserves for the impatient: a merger with SPAC Churchill Capital Corp XI valuing it at $2.5 billion, with about $620 million in expected gross proceeds and a $200 million PIPE led by Foxconn. Among the shareholders gaining an exit door are Amazon, NVIDIA and SoftBank's Vision Fund 2. It will trade on Nasdaq under the symbol AGLT, becoming the first US-listed company dedicated purely to humanoids. The queue for the bell is no longer only Chinese: the western hemisphere just got in line.

Digit's pitch is not a backflip: it is 65,000 hours of billed shifts. The humanoid that promises the least is the first that will show its books in America.

The person at the helm deserves the story. Peggy Johnson did not build robots in her previous life: she built deals. As Microsoft's executive vice president of business development she helped engineer the $26 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, the largest in the company's history; she then ran Magic Leap, the augmented reality unicorn that had to land from its own promises; and in 2024 she took the wheel at Agility, founded in 2015 by Damion Shelton and Jonathan Hurst on the ostrich legs of Hurst's Oregon State lab. The turn has its poetry: the executive who bought the network where the world posts its résumé now rents out metal workers by the shift.

Because that is exactly what Agility sells, and it is what makes this listing different. Digit's pitch is not a backflip: it is more than 65,000 working hours logged across nine commercial sites, with customers like GXO, Toyota and Mercado Libre, much of it billed as robots-as-a-service: the client does not buy the humanoid, it buys the shift. At Schaeffler's South Carolina plant, Digit has been loading and unloading an industrial washing machine since early 2025, and Schaeffler, which also invested in the company, talks of deploying humanoids across its network of 100 plants by 2030. And when Johnson is asked about the home robot, she answers what almost nobody in her industry dares: that it is ten-plus years away. The anti-hype humanoid is the one going public first.

Here this publication takes out its magnifying glass, and the filings already read loud. The good: the numbers exist and are signed. The hard: about $37 million in trailing annual revenue against a $2.5 billion valuation (some 68 times declared revenue, and 19% above its last private round), roughly $100 million of cash consumed in 2025, and operating expenses that climbed from $71 million to $111 million in a year. And the most important asterisk: the more than $300 million in "committed" orders for Digit v5 depend on milestones being met and rest on a three-year, 1,000-robot contract from a customer whose name is not disclosed. SPACs, moreover, carry a track record that counsels caution: promising in a prospectus is cheaper than delivering in a warehouse.

For the reader, the meaning is double. First: between Unitree ringing the bell in Shanghai and Agility on Nasdaq, both hemispheres will finally have humanoids with accounts audited every quarter, the best possible news for anyone who wants to separate the real robot from the stage robot: our thesis that the prospectus is the ultimate reality mark just went global. Second: the pressure now falls on the private rivals. When your competitors publish revenue, margin and cash burn, "we are in talks with major customers" stops being an answer, and private humanoid giants like Figure will have to choose between showing numbers or explaining why not.

What to watch has names and dates. The S-4 form, which will bring the full financial breakdown. The merger close and AGLT's first trading day. Whether the anonymous 1,000-robot customer steps forward by name. The real rollout of Digit v5, announced for late 2025 and now accountable in public. And the number this house cares about most: how many of those 65,000 hours become a hundred thousand, because shifts, unlike videos, cannot be edited.