Digit 5's $300 Million in Orders Covers Fewer Than 1,000 Robots

Agility Robotics says it holds more than $300 million in multi-year orders for its Digit 5 humanoid, but IEEE Spectrum reported that fewer than 1,000 robots stand behind that figure. The gap between those two numbers is the argument worth having about the machine.

IEEE Spectrum and The Robot Report both published detailed accounts of Digit 5 on Sept. 15. The company calls it the first cooperatively safe humanoid, meaning it is meant to work beside people without a cage. Early access is planned for the first half of 2027 and general availability for the end of 2027, according to The Robot Report.

What the spec sheet says about runtime

The headline claim is that Digit 5 can work more than 20 hours in a 24-hour day. The number that matters here is not 20 but 90, the minutes of runtime per charge that The Robot Report listed, paired with a nine-minute charge. Agility describes that as a 10-to-1 run-to-charge ratio, up from 2-to-1 on Digit 4.

The arithmetic holds. A 99-minute cycle of 90 minutes working and nine charging repeats 14.5 times in a day, which is about 21.8 hours of work. It also means the robot has to return to a charger every 90 minutes, so the 20-hour figure describes a site with charging built into the workflow, not a robot that carries a shift's worth of energy.

Spec	Digit 5	Source
Height and weight	1.8 m, 129 kg	IEEE Spectrum
Repeated lift	22.7 kg (50 lb)	The Robot Report
Runtime per charge	90 minutes	The Robot Report
Charge time	9 minutes	The Robot Report

The payload line carries its own caveat. Agility lists 50 pounds for repeated lifts, and IEEE Spectrum gave 23 kilograms lifted to 2.1 meters. Neither figure says how many lifts per hour a robot sustains, which is the denominator a warehouse manager would ask for first.

The safety design removes the fall, not the risk

Co-founder and Chief Robot Officer Jonathan Hurst is quoted by The Robot Report on the safety work: "It is completely holistic. It touches every feature of the robot electrically, mechanically, sensors, computing, everything." The system uses 360-degree people detection, an independent safety controller, and a response that slows, stops or sits the robot on the floor as a person approaches.

IEEE Spectrum reported that Agility does not rest the claim on a published standard. It rests it on behaviour: put down the load, sit, power down the motors, so that tipping onto a person is physically impossible. That is a strong design argument for a 129 kg machine. It is also a claim a customer's safety officer, not a press release, has to accept, and Agility is pursuing CE marking for the EU and UK, The Robot Report said.

What $300 million buys

Spectrum's reporting puts a bill of materials, the cost of parts before assembly and margin, at $150,000 to $200,000 at launch. It reports a projected cost under $50,000 per unit at 10,000 units a year, and a service price of about $8,500 a month.

1. Bill of materials at launch, high200K USD
2. Bill of materials at launch, low150K USD
3. Projected cost at 10,000 units a year50K USD

Source: IEEE Spectrum, Sept. 15, 2026

Two readings follow. First, $8,500 a month is $102,000 a year, so the parts bill alone is covered in 17.6 to 23.5 months of service fees, before any engineering, support or financing cost. Second, if $300 million is spread across fewer than 1,000 robots, each order is worth more than $300,000 over its contract term. Those are Spectrum's and Agility's numbers divided against each other; neither company published that division.

A $1.8 million business with a $2.5 billion price

Agility agreed in June to go public through a merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI at a $2.5 billion pre-money equity value, with more than $620 million of gross proceeds. The 8-K exhibit filed with the SEC breaks that into $420 million from the Churchill trust and about $200 million from a private placement at $10 a share led by Foxconn. The Robot Report put 2025 net sales at $1.8 million.

The filing also lists what the earlier Digit has done: more than 65,000 operating hours across nine customer facilities, with Schaeffler, GXO, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada and Mercado Libre named as customers. That averages about 7,200 hours per facility. Spectrum's account of Digit 5 said it was not yet deployed in factories, so the 65,000 hours describe a different generation of the robot.

Manufacturing Dive described the $300 million differently, as one customer planning to spend that over several years, with a pipeline of more than 30 prospects. The filing says multi-year orders without naming a single buyer. The two accounts cannot both be right as written, and Agility has not said which is.

The money is also moving through the wider sector. The Terminal has covered AMD's $8.2 billion purchase of World Labs and Efficient Computer's $97 million round, and both carry the robotics tag on this site.

What would change this read

The variable that settles the question is delivered units, not orders. If Agility reports Digit 5 robots working a full 90-minute cycle at a named customer site in the second half of 2027, with lifts per hour and incident counts attached, the cost argument becomes testable. If early access slips past mid-2027, or the 1,000-robot ceiling holds while the dollar figure grows, the contract value is mostly a statement about price. The merger with Churchill is expected to close in 2026, subject to shareholder approval.