A humanoid maker opened its books
ResearchUntil this month, what a humanoid earns and costs in a Western factory was known only from press releases and analysts' models. Agility Robotics, going public through a merger with a listed shell company, has now filed audited revenue, its cost to build a robot and its price list with the US securities regulator. The numbers are small, specific and worth reading slowly.
2026-10-02 · Field notes · 6 min read · By Sondre Hegerland KristiansenAgility makes Digit, a two-legged humanoid that moves totes in warehouses and factories. Its merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI values it at USD 2.5 billion, and the first amendment to the registration statement was filed on 30 September 2026. A registration statement carries liability for what it says, which is why it is a better source on this industry than anything the industry has published about itself.
Nine facilities, USD 1.78 million
Digit is deployed or committed at nine customer facilities, including Schaeffler, GXO, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada and Mercado Libre, and had logged more than 65,000 hours of commercial operation by May 2026. That work produced net sales of USD 1.78 million in 2025, up from USD 310,000 the year before. Two customers accounted for USD 1.55 million of it, about 87%.
In the first half of 2026, net sales were USD 174,000, down 72% from USD 625,000 a year earlier, because 2025 included about USD 0.5 million of one-time robot sales. The cost of goods sold over the same six months was USD 3.9 million, so every dollar of revenue cost more than twenty to deliver. The net loss was USD 361.9 million, of which roughly USD 121 million was an increase in stock-based compensation. Cash at 30 June was USD 14.7 million, and the company states substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern without the merger.
None of this is a scandal. It is what a company looks like a year before its volume product ships. It is also the most precise public answer yet to how much paid humanoid work exists: real, recurring, and measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars a half-year.
A humanoid rents for USD 8,500 a month
The filing sets out two ways to pay for the next model, Digit 5, which reaches early access in the first half of 2027. As a service, a robot costs USD 8,500 a month including software and maintenance, plus about USD 25,000 to deploy it. Bought outright, it costs about USD 200,000 upfront, USD 20,000 to deploy, and USD 36,000 a year for software and maintenance. Amazon's earlier purchase of five robots for USD 1.05 million, about USD 210,000 each, sits right on that list price.
A monthly fee is not an hourly wage, and the conversion depends entirely on the customer. At USD 102,000 a year, by this site's arithmetic, a robot costs about USD 51 per hour on one 2,000-hour shift, about USD 25 on two, and about USD 14 if it really works the 20 hours a day Agility claims for Digit 5's battery. The vendor sets the fee. Utilization, which is the customer's floor, its shift pattern and its workflow, sets the hourly cost.
The deployment fee is the integration bill from last week's note, now printed as a line item. Agility charges about USD 25,000 to put a robot on site and estimates its own cost at USD 15,000.
USD 150,000 to build, USD 30,000 hoped for
Agility puts the cost to build a Digit 5 at about USD 150,000 at commercial launch, targeting USD 75,000 at 1,000 robots a year and USD 30,000 at 10,000, which is the stated capacity of its RoboFab plant in Salem, Oregon. The filing claims capital payback of less than a year under the service model. On the filing's own definition, fees received exceeding the build cost, that holds at the USD 75,000 target. At the launch cost it takes about 18 months. Both are reasonable for an industrial asset, and only one of them exists today.
The same structure says where the margin lives. Over five years of service, the customer pays about USD 535,000 and the hardware is the largest single cost Agility carries. Halve the hardware and the price list does not have to move at all. The cheaper robot becomes the vendor's margin, not the customer's saving, unless competition forces it through.
The anchor order comes with equity attached
The figure that led the coverage, USD 300 million of committed multi-year orders for Digit 5, is one customer taking 1,000 robots on a three-year service contract, subject to contractual milestones, product features and specifications. That works out to about USD 100,000 per robot-year, in line with the list price. The filing describes the customer as a related party and commits Agility to 453 share warrants per robot, 453,000 in all, vesting as robots are deployed. The exercise price was not set when the statements were issued, so the size of the discount cannot be computed.
The filing does not name the customer. Schaeffler is both an Agility investor and a customer the filing says has committed to scaling Digit 5 across its manufacturing footprint, but the filing does not connect the two, and neither does this note. What can be said is narrower and still important: the largest order on the only US humanoid books now public is from an insider, paid partly in the vendor's own stock, and conditional on a product that has not shipped.
What this bears on, and what would change it
P-01 in the register predicts humanoids doing real, paid industrial work, not pilots or demos, by 2031. This filing is the first audited evidence that such work exists today, and also that it is small: one leading vendor, nine facilities, and revenue that fell this half. P-02 predicts first wide adoption in repetitive, undesirable work. The filing says today's deployments are mainly moving bins and totes, which fits.
P-03 predicts unit cost falling well below the roughly USD 20,000 of 2026. Agility's own figure for building an industrial humanoid in 2026 is USD 150,000, and even its target at 10,000 robots a year is USD 30,000. Which robot the 2026 baseline described is a question for the register to settle, not this note. P-18 predicts the moat is the framework, not the robot. Agility's recurring line is software and maintenance, and the filing lists an outage of its own cloud fleet platform, Arc, as a risk that would leave robots unable to receive workflow instructions. The control layer sits with the vendor. Nothing here is scored and the register is untouched.
What would change the reading: Digit 5 shipping on schedule with the anchor order converting into recognized revenue, a second unrelated customer at comparable scale, or a competitor publishing audited figures that make Agility's look like an outlier rather than the frontier.
What this is built on
SEC EDGAR: Churchill Capital Corp XI, Amendment No. 1 to Form S-4, filed 2026-09-30 ·GeekWire: Agility's new Digit 5 robot lifts 50 pounds, works 20+ hours a day and operates alongside people ·TechRepublic: report on Digit 5's order concentration, 2026-09-16 ·Moduloa: The robot was never the expensive part
Revenue, costs, cash, customer concentration, the order terms and the warrant commitment are taken from the registration statement, which includes audited 2025 statements and unaudited interim statements for the first half of 2026. The unit economics are the company's illustrative management estimates, which the filing itself says may not be achieved. GeekWire and TechRepublic independently report the 2025 revenue, the single-customer order, the related-party deal, the Amazon purchase and the early-access timing. The per-hour, payback, five-year and per-robot-year figures are this site's arithmetic on the filing's numbers, not figures the company published.
Add to this
Corrections, evidence, and disagreement are welcome. This is knowledge in the open. Anyone can read; sign in with GitHub only to post or react, and it appears here instantly.