AGCO's Digit Pilot Starts in 2027, and Agility Has Nine Customer Sites Against a $2.5 Billion SPAC Valuation

The number in dispute in Agility Robotics' stock-market debut is not the $2.5 billion valuation but the nine. That is how many customer facilities the company says have committed deployments of its Digit humanoid today, according to the investor release Churchill Capital Corp XI filed with the SEC. The newest addition is a tenth-in-waiting: AGCO, the Duluth, Georgia, maker of Fendt, Massey Ferguson, PTx and Valtra, signed a commercial agreement on October 21 to start a pilot at its Hesston, Kansas, plant in 2027.

What the AGCO pilot covers, and when

The Robot Report, which covered the agreement on October 21, says Digit will support assembly and production tasks, starting with sorting and stacking parts and placing totes for storage. Those are parts-handling jobs, and the report names no task on a finished machine. The pilot is a 2027 event; nothing is on the line in Hesston yet.

Thomas Enghof, AGCO's director of manufacturing technology, called humanoids and A.I. essential "teammates" for flexible factories. Daniel Diez, Agility's chief business officer, said the arrangement could strengthen manufacturing processes. Neither statement carries a robot count, a contract length or a price, and the agreement does not say whether AGCO is buying Digit units or paying by the month.

Agility says the robots are managed through its Agility Arc cloud platform, which it says avoids major changes to a plant's infrastructure. That is a vendor claim; no AGCO measurement of it has been published.

The nine sites behind the Churchill XI deal

The SEC-filed release is where the denominators live. Agility and Churchill Capital Corp XI (Nasdaq: CCXI) are merging; the SEC declared the joint Form S-4 effective on October 13, 2026, and Churchill's shareholders vote on November 2. The combined company is to trade as AGLT. Gross proceeds are expected to exceed $620 million: about $424 million in Churchill's trust account if no one redeems, plus a PIPE of about $200 million led by Foxconn.

The deal was first priced in June. Robotics 24/7 reported a $2.5 billion pre-money equity value and a trust of $420 million on June 29; the October release puts the trust at $424 million, a $4 million difference that neither document explains. The October release itself states no valuation, no share price and no revenue.

Figure from the Churchill XI release	Value
Customer facilities with committed deployments	9
Target by end of 2027	up to 25
Prospects in discussion or the acceleration program	more than 30
Target prospects by end of 2027	about 100
Digit 5 committed orders, conditional on milestones	more than $300 million
Digit operating hours, earlier generations	more than 65,000

1. Today9 sites
2. Target, end of 202725 sites

Source: Churchill Capital Corp XI investor release, SEC exhibit 99.1, accessed 2026-10-22

What 65,000 hours and $300 million do and do not show

The 65,000 hours is the sentence worth reading twice, because it covers earlier generations of Digit. Divided by the 8,760 hours in a year, it is about 7.4 robot-years of round-the-clock work. Spread over nine customers and several hardware revisions, that is a pilot-scale fleet, not a production one.

The $300 million is conditional: the release says the Digit 5 orders are subject to contractual milestones, product features and specifications. Digit 5, unveiled last month with new legs, upgraded batteries and a broader safety architecture, reaches early-access customers in early 2027, so no order has been fulfilled on the machine it describes.

Contrast the plant with the customer list. RoboFab in Salem, Oregon, is designed to build up to 10,000 robots a year; the 2027 customer target is 25 facilities. Either most of that capacity is for a customer base several times larger than the company projects, or the deployments are expected to be large. The filing gives no per-site robot count, so the figure that would settle it, units per facility, is missing.

Who is already paying

The release names Schaeffler, GXO and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada as customers with commercial deployments or agreements. Toyota's is a Robot-as-a-Service agreement signed after a successful pilot, meaning the revenue is a recurring fee rather than a hardware sale. That matters for the valuation: a $2.5 billion price on a fleet that is rented, not sold, is a bet on retention and on how many robots each site eventually runs.

NVIDIA chose Agility as the launch partner for its Halos safety system for physical A.I. and humanoids, and FORT Robotics is a partner on cooperative safety. Safety certification is the gate between a pilot in a caged cell and a robot working beside people, and AGCO's plan of putting Digit beside employees depends on it.

What would change my read

The reading here is that Agility is selling a credible 2027 more than a 2026 business. Three things would move it: a disclosed robot count per site, the price or monthly fee per Digit, and the first Digit 5 delivery in early 2027. Redemptions are the near-term variable; the $424 million trust figure assumes none, and the November 2 vote will show how many holders take their cash instead.

For related coverage of the robotics funding market, see Warp Sciences' $215 million round, and for how the site has covered valuations set against earlier peaks, the boom-era exits analysis.