Agility’s Digit V5 Humanoid Robot Walks Out of the Cage, Redecorates Room

Agility Robotics posted a short clip this week of Digit rearranging a room, dragging a couch and shifting chairs, bags, and household clutter as if the furniture were just another tote. That demo is the company showing off generalized manipulation: objects of different sizes, weights, and grips, moved through a space built for people. The same skill set is what Digit already uses on mixed loads and changing layouts inside warehouses.

Agility’s new shipping target is December, which is when the first Digit V5 machines will be delivered to early customers. Current Digits are still confined to enclosed locations, but V5 is designed to leave that behind. Cameras and sensors monitor humans, and software attempts to make sense of what’s going on before the robot’s hips and knees spring into action quickly enough to keep everyone safe. Agility put that part through some really harsh stress tests, including pulling the floor out from under the robot, and it took a step and held on. Chief business officer Daniel Diez summarizes the main issue as being more about skills and batteries than cages, but those physical barriers take up floor space, disrupt workflows, and essentially kill deals; eliminating them means Digit can now enter retail and pharmaceutical floors that can’t even spare a locked-down cell.

The payload has been increased to 50 pounds from 35 pounds in previous models, and the arm reach has been extended to 7.2 feet. You can now run for roughly 20 hours on a single charge, which is enough to cover three shifts with one machine. Arm ends now use a standard ISO flange so Digit can pick from the huge existing catalog of industrial grippers and tools. This is helpful because Agility has already demonstrated things like robot switching tools for itself, and they intend to fully automate swaps in the not-too-distant future. Inside the V5 is NVIDIA’s IGX Thor computer and the Halos safety platform, which is noteworthy because Agility was the first humanoid manufacturer to use that safety technology.


Existing Digits have now accumulated over 65,000 hours across nine customer sites. We have huge names lined up, like Schaeffler in South Carolina, GXO (over 100,000 totes transported in one Georgia location), Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, Mercado Libre in San Antonio, and Amazon, which is already growing its footprint in all of its fulfillment centers. There’s also a long list of over 30 new customers who are just starting to consider larger buys. We’re already talking about multi-year orders for V5 worth $300 million, subject to usual contractual milestones, so that’s one massive multi-robot transaction worth a cool 1,000 units, whose buyer remains anonymous for the time being.


Cash is pouring in to fund all of this owing to a merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI, which has given Agility a $2.5 billion value and will bring in $620 million. Of that, Foxconn led a PIPE that brought in approximately $200 million. Amazon, NVIDIA, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2 are among the companies represented on the cap table. They expect to complete the transaction later this year, when Agility will begin trading under the symbol AGLT. Once that happens, the money will be used to fill orders, scale up V5 production, and grow the new 60,000 square foot Physical AI hub in Fremont, California. It’s only a few kilometers from Tesla’s proposed Optimus Line. The idea is to hire roughly 200 technical and field workers to teach the robots in environments similar to the workplaces where they will work.