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🌾 Welcome to StableBread's Newsletter!

Unitree, the Chinese maker of humanoid robots and robot dogs, listed in Shanghai on August 19, opened 629% above its IPO price at a ~$66B valuation, and still closed the day up 460% at a ~$48B market cap on just ¥1.7B (~$240M) of 2025 revenue. That's ~200x sales!

The market isn't just betting on humanoid robots—it's treating them as an inevitability.

Just look at what the biggest names in the space are saying and actively doing:

Wall Street has followed with their own optimistic forecasts:

But the reality today is a humanoid market that barely exists.

The leading companies in the space have only deployed a small number of robots in controlled pilots, mostly behind safety barriers, and every forecast above assumes a humanoid that's capable, safe, and cheap enough to run at scale (which is still largely unproven).

Even the bulls put the real volume in the 2030s. Bank of America's own curve doesn't pass 1.2 million a year until 2030, with industrial and service uses carrying it until then, and Morgan Stanley expects adoption to stay "relatively slow until the mid-2030s."

The question is whether today's handful of pilots can connect to that promised scale, and if you believe they eventually can, what are the best pure-play stocks to buy?

The one investors are flocking to, especially after Unitree's IPO craze, is Agility Robotics, which will soon be the only pure-play humanoid company listed in the U.S.

It's going public via a SPAC led by Churchill Capital Corp XI (Nasdaq: CCXI) at a $2.5B pre-money valuation, and the combined company will trade as AGLT once the merger closes.

CCXI: Stock Price

CCXI closed at $10.42 the day before the June 24 announcement, peaked at $19.10 on July 2, and now sits at $13.40/share.

Agility makes Digit, a two-legged robot that already does paid work in a handful of U.S. warehouses and factories.

Its management sizes the opportunity at $1 trillion across U.S. manufacturing, distribution, and logistics, and CEO Peggy Johnson said $1.25 trillion by 2032 on the June 24 announcement call, calling it "the TAM that our robot Digit can address."

If you've been following my research, you'd know I've written up three pre-merger SPAC setups in 2026, and the scorecard is mixed:

  • Boost Run (BRUN): Closed its merger, ran to $42, and trades at ~$16/share today, up 57.2% from the $10.70 when I wrote it up.

  • Forge Nano (ATII): Still pre-merger at $10.65, near its trust value.

  • Exascale Labs (BCAR): Shareholders approved the deal on July 29 with 95.95% of the public shares redeemed at $10.35, and once the trust floor was gone the stock fell from $10.36 to $4.16 in three sessions. It now trades as XLAB below $4/share.

The key difference with CCXI as a SPAC setup is that it's already jumped pre-merger. Its trust held $10.16 at June 30 and accrues ~$0.09 a quarter, so it’ll hover ~$10.25 by a fall vote. At $13.40/share you're paying a 30.7% premium to that floor, and redeeming would cost you 23.5%.

In this 7.8k-word deep dive, I do the work almost no one else has. I discuss what Agility has today, the safety certifications, the $300M order book and 30-customer pipeline, the actual economics, the geopolitical angle and lobbying, the SPAC terms, and the stock's realistic valuation range from here.

What Agility Sells

Agility builds Digit, a 5'9", 140-pound bipedal robot with two arms, a head, and a face. The current version, Digit v4, lifts up to 35 pounds, runs ~4 hours on a charge, and docks itself to recharge.

Its job today is simple material handling, meaning it picks up plastic totes and bins and moves them between shelves, conveyors, and the wheeled autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) that already roam large warehouses.

CCXI: Digit v4 loading baskets of bearing parts into a washer at Schaeffler's Cheraw, South Carolina plant (June 2026 Investor Presentation; Slide 16)

Customers can get Digit two ways:

  1. Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS): Agility keeps the robot on its own balance sheet and charges a monthly fee, which the deck illustrates at $8,500/month (~$100K/year), priced at a discount to the customer's fully burdened labor rate. The S-4 says all $300M of the v5 orders are structured this way.

  2. Ownership: The customer buys the robot for ~$200K, pays a ~$20K deployment fee, and subscribes to Arc software and maintenance at ~$36K/year, which adds up to the ~$400K five-year cost, robot included.

Agility's own software is Agility Arc, a cloud platform that assigns tasks and monitors the fleet. Arc plugs into warehouse management systems from Manhattan Associates and into AMRs from two vendors, MiR and Zebra.

MiR is the Danish robot unit of Teradyne, the chip-testing equipment maker, and Zebra is the barcode-scanner company that bought Fetch Robotics in 2021 and then sold that AMR business to Skild AI in April 2026.

Most of the rest is outsourced. Ricoh, the office-equipment company, maintains and repairs Digits in the field, and two warehouse-automation integrators, Zion Solutions Group and Tompkins Solutions, install them at customer sites.

One supplier is publicly traded. Ability Enterprise (2374.TW), a Taiwanese camera-module maker in the Abico group, is co-developing vision modules for Digit, has put $10M into Agility with another $10M planned, and holds sales agency rights for Agility's robots in parts of Asia.

All of that infrastructure serves a short customer list. Today it's only five names:

  1. Schaeffler: The German bearings maker, running Digit at its Cheraw, South Carolina plant.

  2. GXO: A contract logistics provider that runs warehouses for other brands. It signed what it called the industry's first multi-year humanoid RaaS contract in June 2024 for its Spanx facility outside Atlanta.

  3. Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada: Signed a RaaS agreement in February 2026 after a year-long pilot.

  4. Mercado Libre: Agreed in December 2025 to put Digit in a San Antonio fulfillment center, with language about testing rather than scaling.

  5. Amazon: Invested in 2022 and tested Digit at a Seattle-area facility in 2023. Amazon bought five Digits for $1.05M in 2025, most of the year's revenue, and the filing lists it among the sites where Digit v4 "is performing useful work today."

Although Amazon bought Fauna Robotics in March 2026, it's not a direct competitor to Agility since Fauna’s building a 3.5-foot, $50K soft-bodied humanoid for homes and research rather than warehouse work.

Beyond the five, the S-4 says four unnamed customers had joined its Customer Acceleration Program as of May 2026, paying ~$500,000 each for a trial that runs from a proof of technology to a RaaS pilot.

CCXI: Agility's headline metrics, customers, and partners (June 2026 Investor Presentation; Slide 11)

The slide above is the deck's proof that Digit works, and it comes down to four numbers: (1) Nine committed facility deployments, (2) 65,000 hours of operation, (3) 125,000 totes moved, and (4) 98% accuracy.

The S-4 repeats all four as of May 2026 and shows the totes came from two customers, 100,000 at GXO and 25,000 at Schaeffler.

What the slide doesn't show is how few robots are behind those numbers.

In March 2025, CEO Peggy Johnson said Agility expected to ship hundreds of Digits that year. Co-founder Jonathan Hurst now puts that two years out.

He told the Portland Business Journal in August, in an article Churchill filed with the SEC, that the RoboFab factory is "currently producing fewer than 100 a year" and should reach "triple digits" in 2027.

The S-4's own risk factors go further and say Agility doesn't "currently have the facility capacity, employees, or equipment needed to manufacture its products in high volume."

That's the same company whose deck rates the factory for 10,000 a year, which gives you an indication of just how difficult it is to scale a humanoid production line.

Ten Years to Nine Facilities

Agility spun out of Oregon State University's robotics lab in 2015, founded by professor Jonathan Hurst, Damion Shelton, and Mikhail Jones. Its first product was Cassie, a pair of ostrich-like legs built on DARPA-funded research, sold to university labs.

Digit arrived in 2019 with a torso and arms, and Ford bought the first two production units in January 2020. Playground Global led an $8M round in 2018, and DCVC and Playground led a $20M round in 2020. The $150M Series B in April 2022 brought in Amazon's Industrial Innovation Fund.

The commercial version, Digit v4 with a head and hands, launched in March 2023. That September Agility announced RoboFab, a 70,000 square-foot factory in Salem, Oregon, with a stated capacity of 10,000 robots a year.

Amazon's test began the next month, and the GXO pilot that became its first RaaS contract started near the end of 2023.

Peggy Johnson took over as CEO in March 2024, with Shelton moving to president. Here are the commercial milestones since then:

  • November 2024: Schaeffler invested and signed a purchase agreement, saying it could deploy "a significant number" of humanoids across its 100 plants by 2030.

  • September 2025: NVIDIA's venture arm invested.

  • November 2025: Digit crossed 100,000 totes moved at GXO.

  • December 2025: Mercado Libre signed.

  • February 2026: Toyota Canada signed.

  • July 2026: Agility opened a 60,000 square-foot software hub in Fremont, California, and said it would hire nearly 200 AI and field-operations staff there.

That Fremont hiring plan is a large add for a company of 393 full-time employees at June 30, and it lines up with the deck's R&D guide jumping from $74M in 2025 to ~$115M in 2026. The S-4 shows the Fremont lease was signed on February 10, four months before the deal, at $27.5M over 10 years.

The S-4 puts gross equity raised at $395.8M through 2025. The Series C round that ran from November 2024 to February 2026 accounts for ~$223M of it ($51.0M of C-1 at $36.86/share, $13.9M of C-2 from converted notes, and $157.9M of C-3 at $66.15/share), and the July 2026 SAFEs add $100M on top.

Interestingly, the 2025 round came after a takeover approach. The Information reported that SoftBank's Masayoshi Son met Agility in late 2024 and discussed buying the whole company for at least $900M.

Agility raised money instead, with SoftBank participating. The Series C-3 round valued the company at ~$1.985B post-money, Churchill's first letter of intent on March 2, 2026 proposed $2.5-3.0B, and the deal signed at the bottom of that range.

So the SPAC values Agility 25.9% above its last round and 2.8x the SoftBank number.

Management Team

Agility’s bench is strong on people who have commercialized new hardware categories, and light on people who have scaled a factory to thousands of units:

CCXI: Agility's leadership team at the deal announcement, before the July CFO hire split Hunter's dual role (June 2026 Investor Presentation; Slide 10)

  • CEO (Peggy Johnson): Joined March 2024 from Magic Leap, where she was CEO from 2020 to 2023 and refocused it from consumer headsets to enterprise, after 24 years at Qualcomm and six as Microsoft's EVP of business development under Satya Nadella. She’s also on the boards of BlackRock and Fox Corp.

  • Co-Founder and Chief Robot Officer (Jonathan Hurst): The scientist behind Cassie and Digit. Carnegie Mellon PhD and Oregon State professor.

  • CFO (Michael Beer): Hired July 23, 2026, four weeks after the deal was signed. Former CFO of Energy Vault (NRGV), ran financial strategy and IR at Luminar through its 2020 SPAC, and spent more than a decade as a sell-side analyst.

  • COO (Jennifer Hunter): Held both the CFO and COO titles until Beer arrived. Former COO of SunPower, with more than 9 years at Amazon including the Kiva Robotics integration. She now runs manufacturing and supply chain, the job that decides whether the ramp happens.

  • CBO (Daniel Diez): Came from Magic Leap with Johnson and runs sales.

The S-4 also shows who's paid what. Johnson earns a $475,000 base and holds 550,000 options struck at $5.10 from March 2024. Hunter and Chief Legal and People Officer Ana Lang got 350,000 and 300,000 options at $26.31 in November 2025, plus $250,000 retention bonuses each, paid quarterly through 2026.

Johnson has also put her own money in. She bought $2.5M of Series C-3 stock at $66.15/share in August 2025, the same price as the outside investors.

After the close the board has seven seats, six chosen by Agility and one by the sponsor, with co-founder Damion Shelton as chairman.

Three notable people have left:

  • Former CTO and CPO (Melonee Wise): The Fetch Robotics founder was hired as CTO in May 2023, moved to CPO in 2024, and left in August 2025 for KUKA, the German industrial robot-arm maker owned by China's Midea.

  • Former COO (Aindrea Campbell): The former Apple iPad operations director who opened RoboFab as COO in 2023. She's no longer on the leadership page.

  • Former CCO (Rich Bohne): Quoted as Agility's CCO in September 2024, and CCO at Vecna Robotics, an AMR maker, by March 2025.

Wise's exit matters for a reason beyond pedigree. A month after leaving, she told IEEE Spectrum: "I don't think anyone has found an application for humanoids that would require several thousand robots per facility."

That’s the former head of product questioning the density the order book assumes. If no site requires thousands of Digits, growth means winning new sites rather than filling existing ones, and Agility has won nine since Digit went commercial in 2023.

Safety is the Product

Today, every humanoid working in a factory does so behind physical safety barriers, Digit included. Management is candid that those barriers are what's stopping the company from scaling.

On the announcement call, Hurst called safety "the biggest blocker" and said Digit v5 "will be the scaling moment for humanoid robots."

The reason is regulatory, not technical. A robot arm bolted to the floor can be certified under decades-old standards. A 140-pound machine that balances on two legs can fall, and no published standard covers that risk.

The IEEE's humanoid study group wrote in September 2025 that existing robot safety standards assume a base that "is either fixed or has a statically stable base," and that "none of these specialized safety standards apply to humanoids."

A December 2025 scoping review of 121 studies in the journal Electronics found "a significant lag in standardization and regulation compared to the rapid pace of technological advancement."

CCXI: Agility's three-phase safety roadmap, from caged v4 to cooperative v5 (June 2026 Investor Presentation; Slide 33)

Without a standard, a customer's insurer has no basis to cover a humanoid walking among workers. So the robot stays behind barriers, and once it's confined to one spot, it's competing with conveyor belts and fixed robot arms that do the same job for less.

Agility's answer has two parts.

The first is Digit v5, designed to detect people, slow down, set its load on the floor, sit, and power off before anyone can touch it. It also lifts 50 pounds, reaches 7.2 feet, charges at a 10-to-1 ratio instead of 2-to-1, and runs ~20 hours a day.

Two days before the SPAC was announced, NVIDIA named Agility the first partner for Halos, its new safety package for robots. That's why v5's safety computer, the chip that decides when the robot stops and sits, is NVIDIA's IGX Thor.

CCXI: Digit v4 versus the planned Digit v5 (June 2026 Investor Presentation; Slide 27)

The second part is the standard itself. The rulebook for dynamically stable robots, ISO 25785-1, is being drafted by an ISO working group whose project leader, per the A3 robotics association, is Agility's own safety engineer Kevin Reese.

Reese is also the lead inventor on Agility's patent for hazard response in a collaborative environment, granted in February 2026. So the company helping write the rulebook also holds a patent on one way to comply with that rulebook.

The deck's wording is generous here. Slide 27 says "New ISO safety standard approved," with a footnote pointing to 25785-1.

What ISO's own site shows is a committee draft, an early stage where member countries comment on the draft before voting on it, and that comment window closed on July 8, 2026.

What was approved is the project to write the standard, which is possibly what the slide means. The standard itself isn't published, and Digit v5 has no third-party certification yet.

The S-4 says it plainly. Its risk factors list ISO 25785-1 among the standards "under development," and the only safety sign-off it claims for Digit is that v4 deployments "have passed OSHA recognized Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratory (NRTL) field evaluations," which is what lets a caged robot run today.

For v5, NVIDIA's Halos lab does a pre-assessment against IEC 61508 and ISO 13849, the functional safety standards insurers recognize, and a separate certifier signs off after that.

Now look at how the timeline has moved:

  • October 2024: Johnson told TIME she hoped Digit would work alongside humans by late 2025.

  • November 2025: The company was targeting early 2027 for full commercial availability.

  • August 2026: Diez told Forbes v5 goes to early customers in December, and Hurst put 2027 production in the triple digits.

  • September 2026: The S-4 puts v5's "initial release" in late 2026 and says commercialization is expected "to begin in 2027."

That December 2026 date is the one to watch.

Any robot with radios needs an FCC equipment authorization before it ships, and the only authorization under Agility's name is for Digit v4, with its last filing in September 2025. When a v5 grant shows up, the December delivery date Diez gave Forbes holds up.

$300M Order Book

The number Agility leads with everywhere, from the deal announcement to the deck, is "$300M+ of Digit v5 orders." The footnote on slide 11 spells out the details.

The figure "relates to 1,000 Digit v5 robots with three-year term RaaS contract, which includes warrants issued to purchaser vesting proportionately to robots deployed," as of May 2026, "subject to the realization of certain contractual milestones," and "not a measure of current period revenue."

Read that footnote carefully: it's a single three-year RaaS contract with a single unnamed customer, not an order book. 1,000 robots over 36 months works out to $8,333/month, right at the $8,500/month illustrative RaaS price.

What the customer gets besides robots is equity. The S-4 says the buyer is "a customer, also a related party," meaning an investor, and that Agility will issue it 453 warrants per robot, on the condition that it takes at least 1,000 robots (453 x 1,000 = 453,000 warrants). The filing adds that Agility "is still evaluating the accounting for this transaction."

The S-4 doesn't name the buyer, but it narrows the field. Two of Agility's investors are also customers in the filing. Schaeffler did $91,500 of business with Agility as a customer in 2025, and Amazon bought five Digits for $1.05M.

The S-4 also shows a warrant from October 2022 on 2,888,182 shares that vests 358 shares per robot purchased, and 1,790 of those shares had vested by year-end.

That's exactly five robots' worth (1,790 / 358), and Amazon is the only customer in the filing that bought five robots. So Amazon already holds a warrant from Agility that vests per robot, and the 1,000-robot order comes with the same setup, a per-robot warrant to a buyer the S-4 calls a related party.

Therefore, the $300M+ of Digit v5 orders is most likely from Amazon.

Agility has done this before. In July 2021 it gave "a potential customer" warrants on 358,000 shares that vest at 358 per robot, which is 1,000 robots' worth. Five years later that customer hasn't bought a single robot, so none have vested, which is what a 1,000-robot warrant commitment can turn into.

CCXI: Deployment proof points at Schaeffler and GXO (June 2026 Investor Presentation; Slide 38)

Then there's the ramp. Agility builds fewer than 100 robots a year today, v5 hasn't shipped, and the first early-customer units arrive in December.

To deliver 1,000 v5 units the factory has to produce more than 10x its current rate, and management's own deployment schedule, the one it gave Churchill's board and the fairness-opinion firm, has ~800 robots in service in 2027. So the contract doesn't finish deploying until 2028 at the earliest, and its three-year revenue clock runs into 2031.

Beyond that one contract, there are the four Customer Acceleration Program customers from earlier, paying ~$500,000 each for a program that walks them from a proof of technology to an on-site proof of concept and a RaaS pilot, with more than 30 prospects behind them. Management calls the pipeline "multiple times" the $300M.

None of the four are named, and a CAP fee is a paid trial, not an order. So being realistic, the v5 order book is one signed customer, four paid trials, and a healthy pipeline.

I can't treat the $300M as backlog until v5 ships and the milestones start clearing, and the S-4 says the same in its own words.

Unit Economics on Paper

Management's most detailed numbers are the illustrative unit economics, which slide 41 summarizes and the S-4 spells out in full:

CCXI: Illustrative customer payback under RaaS and ownership (June 2026 Investor Presentation; Slide 41)

A Digit v4 costs ~$125K to build. Rented at $8,500/month plus a ~$25K deployment fee, it produces ~$500K of revenue over an assumed five-year life, against ~$15K/year of software and maintenance cost and a $15K deployment cost on Agility's side (per the S-4).

Management shows RaaS payback of ~1.5 years at today's cost, falling under a year at 1,000 units a year, and a product margin (before SG&A and R&D) of ~50% at launch rising to ~75% at 10,000 units:

CCXI: Illustrative payback and product margin at launch, 1,000, and 10,000 units a year (June 2026 Investor Presentation; Slide 57)

The S-4 spells out the cost curve the deck only drew. Digit v5's BOM is ~$150K at commercial launch, above v4's $125K, then ~$75K at 1,000 robots a year and ~$30K at 10,000.

So the $30K target sits at a production rate 100x today's, as shown below:

CCXI: The bill-of-materials curve, actual for v4 and expected for v5 (June 2026 Investor Presentation; Slide 46)

The “2.0x potential customer ROI” assumes Digit replaces $200K of annual labor, which the footnote builds from a $30.50 fully burdened hourly rate across two 10-hour shifts, six days a week.

On a single shift that same worker costs ~$61K/year ($30.50 x 2,000 hours), less than the $100K RaaS fee. Digit pays off at high utilization, and a customer that can't fill two shifts of tote work has no reason to rent one.

Bernstein's analysts, quoted in an Oregonian piece Churchill filed with the SEC, believe humanoid prices have to fall 30-50% to be commercially viable. Co-founder Jonathan Hurst's reply in the same article was that Agility is "just about at that cost, at that exact cusp."

Both can be right. Hurst's "cusp" assumes the two-shift, six-day schedule above. Bernstein's 30-50% cut takes the $100K RaaS fee to $50-70K/year, which is roughly the single-shift worker.

Slide 60 has the company-wide spending, with 2024 operating expenses of $71M and 2025 of $111M ($74M R&D, $37M SG&A), and total cash uses of $75M and $102M:

CCXI: Agility's 2024 and 2025 operating expenses and cash uses (June 2026 Investor Presentation; Slide 60)

Those were preliminary, and the audited version in the S-4 is higher:

CCXI: Agility's 2025 results against 2024, in millions (Form S-4, filed September 4, 2026; via SECSift)

The audited 2025 figure is $137.5M ($91.6M R&D + $45.8M SG&A), and the $26.5M gap to the deck is almost all stock comp, which the audit booked at $38.0M against the $11M on slide 60, most of it a mark-to-market on options as the 409A value of the common went from $3.77 to $24.44 in a year.

Slide 59 guides 2026 SG&A to ~$60M and R&D to ~$115M, growing 20% and 15% per year through 2028. That's $175M in 2026, $204M in 2027, and $238M in 2028, or ~$618M over three years, and that's before the cost of the robots themselves.

CCXI: Management's SG&A, R&D, and capex assumptions through 2028 (June 2026 Investor Presentation; Slide 59)

The S-4 also answers the two questions the deck left open.

The first is revenue, which the filing breaks out by type:

CCXI: Agility's 2024 and 2025 revenue by type (Form S-4, filed September 4, 2026; via SECSift)

Revenue was $1.78M in 2025, up from $310K. Robot sales were $1.55M of that, which is the five Digits sold to Amazon ($1.04M) plus $510K that matches the Naval Research Laboratory order to the dollar.

Deployment and professional services, the work at GXO, Schaeffler, Toyota, and the rest, came to $213K, down from $244K in 2024. COGS was $4.47M, so gross margin was negative before a dollar of overhead.

The second is the fleet.

The deck's ~$8M capex guide through 2028 doesn't include robots. Agility builds them from inventory and moves them onto the balance sheet as equipment, $10.1M worth in 2025 against $2.5M of capex, and depreciates them over three years.

At the S-4's ~$75K BOM at 1,000 robots a year, the 1,000-robot RaaS order alone puts ~$75M of robots on the balance sheet, none of it in the capex guide.

All together, 2025 was a $138.1M net loss and $99.8M of operating cash burn on $1.78M of revenue, funded by $162.4M of preferred stock. Agility ended the year with $103.0M of cash, then raised $5.0M more of Series C-3 in February and $100M of SAFEs in July (per the S-4).

That's ~$208M of cash on hand or raised since ($103.0M + $5.0M + $100M) against the deck's ~$175M of 2026 spending, before a single robot is built, so the $576M from the deal (assuming zero redemptions) is the runway from here.

Washington as a Moat

The U.S. is losing the humanoid race to China, and it isn't even close.

Interact Analysis estimates that more than 20,000 humanoids were built in 2025, that Chinese vendors made over 90% of them, with Unitree and Agibot each shipping more than 5,000, and that only ~10% of units went into real-world use.

Counterpoint's count for H1 2026 is more than 22,000 humanoids shipped, up nearly 300% y/y, with the top five vendors, all Chinese, at 86% of the total:

Counterpoint: Market share in global humanoid robot shipments, first half of 2026 (Counterpoint Research Global Humanoid Robot Shipment Tracker; August 2026)

Agility can't win a volume race against China. It can try to close the border.

In 2026, Agility has pushed on three fronts:

  1. A bill: The GUARD Act, introduced June 3 by the chair of the House Select Committee on China, would extend the FCC's Covered List, the mechanism used against Huawei, to humanoid and quadruped robots from Chinese firms. Agility is the only robot maker on the committee's endorsement list, and the committee's press release singles out Unitree. Five days later the Pentagon added Unitree to its list of Chinese military companies. The bill has had a hearing but no vote.

  2. An FCC rule: On July 28 the FCC added foreign-produced advanced robotic devices to the Covered List outright. New models need a Department of War approval or at least 65% domestic content to be authorized. Reuters framed it as a ban on new Chinese robots, but the FCC's order applies to all foreign-produced robots, allies included, which the drone industry's trade group objected to. Digit's ~75% U.S.-sourced parts clear the bar. Unsurprisingly, Johnson told Bloomberg, in a transcript filed with the SEC, "we are supporting the administration's moves."

  3. A tariff: The U.S. Commerce Department opened a Section 232 national security investigation into imported robotics in September 2025. Agility's comment, signed by Diez, said tariffs on imported finished humanoids "would be helpful to our company" and that "only 20 percent of our supplies come from overseas, and no more than one percent from China." No tariff has been proclaimed yet.

Agility is also lobbying.

Its disclosed $183,750 of spending through Q2 2026 across two firms, New Lantern and SIO Advocacy, whose stated targets include the Defense Logistics Agency, the Maritime Administration, the Pentagon, and the Vice President's office.

Those lobbying targets point at defense, which isn't in any of the numbers.

The federal contracting database lists exactly one award to Agility, a $510,000 Naval Research Laboratory purchase of "bipedal humanoid robots for interaction," signed September 30, 2024 as a sole-source order and closed out in May 2026 with no follow-on. NSF and SBIR records show nothing at all.

Slide 8 of the deck lists "Strong political support" as one of the five boxes Churchill checks before backing a company, with "Supports revival of U.S. industrial capacity" as the note next to Agility's checkmark.

CCXI: Churchill's investment framework, with political support as one of five criteria (June 2026 Investor Presentation; Slide 8)

The S-4 goes one step further and says Agility "may seek to derive a substantial portion of its revenue from sales to U.S. federal, state, and foreign government entities," which is as specific as management has been.

For a company at Agility's scale, a protected home market is worth more than any patent.

Interestingly, the S-4 filing never mentions Unitree, Agibot, the GUARD Act, or the FCC's Covered List, and its competitor list is Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Figure AI, Apptronik, 1X, Sanctuary AI, Hexagon, and NEURA Robotics.

In other words, every name on it is American, Canadian, or European. So the competition risk factor is about Figure and Tesla, not the Chinese vendors that built over 90% of last year's humanoids.

SPAC Deal Terms

Churchill XI raised $414M in December 2025, selling 41.4M units at $10.00, each unit one share and one-tenth of a warrant. The sponsor, controlled by Michael Klein, paid $25,000 for 13.8M founder shares and $5.0M for 500,000 private placement units.

The trust is held in cash and stood at $420.9M at June 30, which the S-4 puts at ~$10.16/share.

CCXI: Deal summary and Churchill's two showcase de-SPACs, Oklo and Infleqtion, shown at their peak prices (June 2026 Investor Presentation; Slide 7)

The merger agreement was signed June 24, 2026, and the S-4 shows who owns what at close, with and without redemptions:

CCXI: Pro forma ownership at close, with zero and maximum redemptions (Form S-4, filed September 4, 2026; via SECSift)

If you own CCXI, these are the terms that matter (boring but important):

  1. Valuation: Agility gets $2.5B pre-money, paid in new shares. The per-share price is $2.5B plus every option's exercise price, spread over every share, option, warrant, and SAFE share. The exchange ratio itself is still blank in the S-4 because it's set by the trust value at close.

  2. Ownership: 277.7M shares at close, split 72.7% to Agility holders (201.9M), 14.9% to Churchill's public holders (41.4M), 7.3% to PIPE investors (20.1M new shares sold privately at $10.00 alongside the deal), and 5.1% to the sponsor (14.3M). Add 54.4M of assumed Agility options and 4.19M warrants (per the S-4) and you get the 336.3M fully diluted count I use. If every public share redeems, Agility's holders own 85.4%.

  3. Cash: $576M goes to Agility's balance sheet at zero redemptions ($421M trust + $201M PIPE - $46M of fees). All of it’s new money for the company, since the S-4's sources-and-uses table has no line for cash to existing holders. The PIPE buyers are "existing Agility stockholders and other institutional investors," and ~$60M of the $201M was indicated by Agility's own insiders before the deal was signed.

  4. The SAFEs: Agility raised $100M of SAFEs in July 2026, a month after the deal. They convert at 75% of the deal's per-share price (per the S-4), into ~1.35M Agility shares, so the newest money came in at a 25% discount to the deal price and 43.1% below what you pay at $13.40 (0.75 / ($13.40 / $10.16)).

  5. Redemptions: Agility's closing condition is $200M of trust cash after redemptions plus the PIPE, and the S-4 says the case where every public share redeems "would still result in satisfaction of the Minimum Cash Condition" (Agility would net ~$155M instead of $576M). At $13.40, redeeming at ~$10.25 means a 23.5% loss, so expect the arbitrage funds that own the float to sell in the market instead. That keeps the cash in the deal, but it also suggests a steady stream of sellers.

  6. Lock-up: 180 days for Agility holders and the sponsor, with early release if the stock's VWAP holds $12.00 or better for any 15 trading days in that window. PIPE shares have no lock-up and get registered within 90 days of close (150 if the SEC reviews). There's no earnout, no sponsor forfeiture, and no vesting on the founder shares.

  7. Sponsor economics: The sponsor's 14.3M shares are 5.1% of the count at close, and 13.8M of them are founder shares that cost $25,000 and were worth $185M at $13.40. Churchill's own IPO prospectus says the sponsor recovers its $5.0M investment "even if the trading price of our ordinary shares were as low as $0.48 per share." Klein's firm also gets a $250,000/quarter advisory retainer for two years after close and one of seven board seats.

  8. Dilution: A new incentive plan sized at 13% of fully diluted shares at close (~43.7M shares) that refills 5%/year, plus an employee stock purchase plan at 2% and 4.19M warrants struck at $11.50. The SAFE shares come out of Agility's fixed $2.5B, so they dilute Agility's holders, not CCXI's.

  9. Timeline: The merger agreement expires December 31, 2026 if the deal hasn't closed by then, and the PIPE investors can walk after January 31, 2027. The S-4 went public on September 4 with the exchange ratio, record date, and vote date still blank, and the meeting has to fall 25-35 days after the proxy mails. Johnson has guided to a fall close, and the SPAC itself has until March 18, 2028 to complete a deal.

CCXI: Sources, uses, and pro forma ownership at a $10.00 trust value (June 2026 Investor Presentation; Slide 50)

Of the ~$46M of deal fees, Citi's is the largest. It waived its $14.5M deferred underwriting fee in exchange for a $7.0M advisory fee at close and up to $3.0M more at Churchill's discretion, on top of $1.5M it was paid on announcement. Citi and BTIG also split a ~$8M PIPE placement fee. The sponsor has lent the SPAC $2.25M so far, out of $3.0M in notes convertible at $10.00/unit.

Arbitrage funds own most of the float. Eight Schedule 13G filers reported 14.8M shares, 35.8% of the 41.4M public shares, as of their latest filings, led by Empyrean (7.5%), BlueCrest (5.6%), and Magnetar (4.6%). Magnetar also put $1.0M into the sponsor itself, alongside $1.0M from Klein's own Garden State Capital Partners II (per the S-4).

BlueCrest, Michael Platt's fund, crossed 5% on June 26, two days after the announcement. Meanwhile, the six funds that were 5% holders before the deal cut their combined stake from 38.8% of the public shares to 24.9% by June 30, a 5.8M-share reduction in the quarter the deal was announced.

Klein's Record

The deck shows two Churchill deals, Oklo and Infleqtion, at their peak prices. Oklo went public at $10 and touched $193.84 in October 2025. Infleqtion, which Churchill X closed this February, is shown at $27.50, although the S-4 puts its high at $21.28 on April 17.

On the call Klein said the $11B his SPACs raised has "achieved north of $40 billion of value."

Those are the two winners. Churchill's own 10-K lists the rest.

Churchill III took MultiPlan public in 2020 and the stock fell ~89% from $10. Shareholders sued Klein, arguing his near-free founder shares gave him a reason to close a bad deal rather than no deal. A Delaware court let the case go forward, and it settled for $33.75M.

Churchill IV's Lucid is down ~87% from $10. Clarivate and Skillsoft, from Churchill I and II, traded at $3.57 and $6.61 in December 2025 per the IPO prospectus.

Churchill V, VI, and VII liquidated without deals. Churchill IX's merger with PlusAI was terminated in April 2026 "due to market conditions," two months before this deal was signed, and IX liquidated in July. Klein is running XI, XII, and XIII at the same time, and XIII raised its $414M in August.

Oklo and Infleqtion have since fallen to $44.27 and $13.83 from those peaks, per the Portland Business Journal piece Churchill filed with the SEC.

The S-4 also lists the redemptions on each deal. Clarivate, Lucid, Oklo (at closing), and Infleqtion all had redemptions below 0.1%. MultiPlan had 7.9%, Skillsoft had 50.3%, and Oklo itself saw 44.4% redeem at its extension vote in October 2023, seven months before the deal closed.

The pattern is that Churchill's deals in hot themes with a government angle (nuclear, quantum, now humanoid robots) have rallied out of the gate, while the other ones have mostly ended up below $10.

Valuation

At $13.40/share on 336.3M pro forma shares, the market cap is $4.51B (336.3M x $13.40). Subtract the $576M of deal cash and the enterprise value is $3.93B.

That $576M assumes zero redemptions and ignores Agility's own cash, which was $103.0M at the end of 2025 plus $105M raised since, less whatever 2026 has burned (2025's operating burn was $99.8M).

The S-4 models two cases, zero and 100%, and the deal closes either way, since the $201M PIPE alone covers Agility's $200M minimum cash condition. Klein's own record, above, runs from under 0.1% to 50.3%, and de-SPAC redemptions averaged 68-98% a quarter from 2022 through 2025.

Comps don't help much here. The two closest humanoid names are listed in China at a later stage, and the closest U.S. name is in a different vertical:

  • UBTech: 18.5x sales in Hong Kong after delivering 1,079 full-size humanoids in 2025.

  • Unitree: ~200x in Shanghai on more than 5,000 shipped.

  • Symbotic: 8.1x on $2.65B of warehouse automation revenue.

The most I'd take from them is a multiple range. I'll use 10-20x run-rate revenue, above Symbotic and around UBTech for a Digit v5 that doesn't ship until December, and work out what $13.40/share already assumes.

At the deck's ~$100K/robot/year RaaS fee, $3.93B of enterprise value at 10-20x is $197-393M of revenue ($3.93B / 20x and $3.93B / 10x), or 2,000-3,900 robots deployed and billing.

The order book is 1,000 robots today, and that revenue lands from 2027 to 2031 at best. The factory builds fewer than 100/year today, and management's own deployment schedule in the S-4 has ~800 robots in service in 2027 and ~7,000 by 2030.

So 2,000-3,900 billing robots is a 2028 number on the company's own curve, and at $13.40/share you're paying for 2-4x the entire order book, in service and paying, before v5 has even shipped.

The share count only goes up from here, with 4.19M warrants and a 43.7M-share incentive plan adding to the 336.3M.

Slide 58 turns that $100K/robot/year into a revenue chart:

CCXI: Management's illustrative annual RaaS revenue at each installed base size (June 2026 Investor Presentation; Slide 58)

This is simply an illustration of $100K times a hypothetical installed base, with no year attached. In other words, it's a clean chart up and to the right that says nothing about when, or whether, those robots exist.

Now value the 1,000-robot order book alone at the same 10-20x. That's $100M of revenue at $100K/year, worth $1.0-2.0B.

Add back the $576M of cash (assuming zero redemptions) and that's $4.69-7.66/share ($1.58-2.58B / 336.3M), and even that's high, since most of the $576M is spent on SG&A and R&D ($618M through 2028) before those 1,000 robots are all billing.

Therefore, everything above $7.66 is the bet that humanoids work, that Agility is the U.S. company that gets the volume, and that the market still pays 10-20x sales for humanoid revenue in 2028.

Churchill's fairness opinion, from Ocean Tomo (for a $435,000 fee), ran management's numbers out to 2040 at an 18% discount rate and a 10% terminal growth rate.

They then re-ran them with deployments delayed a year, the BOM stuck at $100K, and RaaS pricing cut 10-20%.

Here's where each case landed per CCXI share:

CCXI: Ocean Tomo's implied value per CCXI share under management's base case and three downside scenarios (Form S-4, filed September 4, 2026; via SECSift)

Even the harshest case came out at $11.39-11.57 against Ocean Tomo's illustrative $10.10 redemption value, and the full range is $11.39-16.69.

Ocean Tomo gave forward revenue multiples "no weight" because Agility "has limited current and near-term revenue against which such multiples could be applied." I'd say the same about the 10% terminal growth rate.

Near term, none of this may matter. The float is 41.4M public shares until the lock-up ends, Roundhill's humanoid ETF owns 184,610 shares, two issuers have filed 2x leveraged ETFs on AGLT, and the stock hit $19.10 in July on the announcement alone.

Humanoid mania can hold CCXI above any fair value for months, through the close and possibly through the first v5 deliveries. The numbers above are what you're paying for, not where the stock goes next.

The Warrants

The warrants (CCXIW) closed at $6.30 on September 1 on 22,353 traded, so the quote is thin. With an $11.50 strike the breakeven is $17.80, 32.8% above the stock, and only $1.90 of the price is intrinsic value.

If the stock holds $18.00 for 20 of 30 trading days, the company can call the warrants at $0.01, which forces you to exercise or sell.

The CCXIW warrants are worth the stock price less $11.50 at the moment they're called, which is $6.50 if that happens at $18.00. Below $17.80 at expiry, five years after close, they're worth zero.

That needs the stock at $18.00, 34.3% above today and 2.3x the $7.66 the order book supports, or the warrant is worth nothing. So it's not wise to touch the warrants.

Where This Leaves Agility Robotics

Churchill Capital Corp XI (CCXI) at $13.40/share is a $4.51B pro forma bet that Agility Robotics turns a working robot, a handful of paying sites, and one 1,000-unit order into thousands of deployed humanoids by 2028.

Digit does paid work at Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler, and Toyota already, the 1,000-robot v5 order most likely comes from Amazon, and four more customers are in paid trials with 30 prospects behind them.

Plus the safety standard it requires is being written by Agility's own engineer with NVIDIA as the safety partner, ~75% of its parts are domestic, and Washington is fencing Chinese humanoids out of the home market.

However, at 10-20x run-rate revenue, $13.40/share already assumes 2,000-3,900 robots deployed and billing, against 1,000 on order and a factory producing fewer than 100 robots in 2026.

The order book alone is worth $4.69-7.66/share at the same 10-20x. Everything above that is the bet that humanoids go from a few hundred caged pilots to thousands of paid deployments, and that Agility is the U.S. company that scales when they do.

And that bet is priced on $1.78M of 2025 revenue against a $138.1M net loss, one milestone-gated order from a related party paid partly in Agility's own warrants, and a v5 that doesn't reach early customers until December.

Then there's the share supply. Arbs sell into the vote, the 216M locked-up shares (77.9% of the count at close) are released after 180 days or ~3 weeks of trading above $12.00, and the 20.1M PIPE shares have no lock-up and register within 90 days of close.

Here’s what I'm watching:

  1. Final S-4: The exchange ratio, the record date, the vote date, and any 2026 numbers, none of which are in the September 4 filing. The customer's name should be in there too.

  2. v5 out the door: An FCC grant for Digit v5, December deliveries, then third-party certification in 2027.

  3. Volume: A second named order from the 30-customer pipeline, and RoboFab output in the hundreds in 2027.

  4. Washington: The GUARD Act passing or a Section 232 tariff, either of which definitively locks Unitree and Agibot out of the U.S. market.

  5. Redemptions: Full trust participation means $576M of cash and three years of runway instead of another equity raise in 2027.

If most of those land, $13.40/share will look cheap, because the market will be valuing Agility on thousands of installed robots instead of one contract, some pilots, and a healthy pipeline.

If the 2026 numbers and v5 both disappoint, the trust floor 23.5% below is the only support left, and it's gone once the merger closes.

It's too early for me to buy into this company. If I do consider buying, it'd be after the post-close washout once the lock-up supply clears and there's better visibility on the v5 ramp.

If you're looking to add a robotics-themed name to your portfolio, consider Ambarella (AMBA) instead.

Disclaimer: This write-up is for informational and educational purposes only and is not investment advice. I may hold positions in the securities discussed. Do your own research before buying or selling any security.

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