Digit 5's Real Number Isn't $300 Million, It's $1.8 Million

Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5, a humanoid robot it says is built to work next to people without the safety cages earlier automation required, on Sept. 15, 2026, according to the company's own announcement. Chief Executive Peggy Johnson said the market has responded with more than $300 million in multi-year customer orders.

That order-book figure is the number every outlet covering the launch has repeated. It is not the number that describes what Agility actually sold in 2025. The Robot Report's coverage of the unveiling puts Agility's 2025 net sales, disclosed as part of its pending SPAC merger with Churchill Capital Corp. XI at a $2.5 billion valuation, at $1.8 million.

What changed in the hardware

Digit 5 replaces the backward-bending knee configuration of earlier Digit versions with a human-like leg design built around proprietary cycloidal actuators, and it pairs a two-fingered parallel-jaw gripper with ISO-standard mounts so end-effectors can be swapped for a given task. Agility says the changes lift its usable runtime far past what the prior generation managed on a single charge.

Spec	Digit 4	Digit 5
Repeatable payload	Baseline	40% greater, up to 50 lb (22.7 kg)
Run-to-charge ratio	2:1	10:1 (90-minute runtime, 9-minute charge)
Vertical reach	5.5 ft	7.2 ft
Deployment hours logged	65,000+ (Digit 4, to date)	None yet

The 10:1 run-to-charge ratio is the figure Agility is leaning on hardest, since a robot that spends nine minutes charging for every 90 minutes worked comes far closer to a human shift pattern than one that needs an hour plugged in for every two worked, the ratio Agility says described Digit 4. That difference is what lets Agility claim more than 20 hours of productive work across a 24-hour day, a figure that assumes near-continuous handoffs between charge cycles rather than a single shift. Jonathan Hurst, Agility's co-founder and chief robot officer, said the company learned through customer deployments that constraints like charger placement and aisle width turn into engineering requirements a lab demo never surfaces, and that building a general-purpose hand capable of both a firm industrial grip and delicate handling remains unsolved industry-wide.

The safety pitch is real, and untested at Digit 5's scale

Digit 5's headline claim is that it can operate near people without the fixed exclusion zones that keep most industrial robots physically separated from workers. Agility describes a three-part system: sensors that continuously track people and trigger the robot to avoid, stop, or sit down; visual and audio cues that signal what the robot is about to do; and an independent safety controller that overrides normal operation the moment someone enters an unsafe distance. Nvidia's IGX Thor and Halos Core platforms underpin the safety framework, according to the company's announcement, and Nvidia vice president Deepu Talla said the goal is moving humanoids "from pilots to industrial deployments at scale."

None of that architecture has run at the deployment scale Agility is now promoting it for. Digit 4 logged more than 65,000 hours of work, including a GXO facility that reportedly reached 100,000 totes moved at close to 98% accuracy, but that history was built inside the caged, separated work zones Digit 5 is specifically designed to operate without. The Robot Report notes that few competing humanoids work near people at all today; most still rely on the same physical separation Digit 5 is promising to remove, which makes Digit 5's safety claim the industry's most aggressive rather than a proven baseline.

Announced, not shipped

Agility's own timeline places early access in the first half of 2027 and general availability at the end of 2027, alongside the company's first deployments outside North America, in the EU, the UK and Northern Ireland under CE marking. No Digit 5 unit is doing paid work today. The $300 million order figure describes commitments for a robot that does not yet exist in the field, from customers Agility has not named beyond confirming that GXO, Schaeffler, Amazon and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada have worked with the Digit line historically.

That gap between commitment and delivery is not unusual for hardware on a multi-year sales cycle, but it means the order book measures buyer intent, not proof the safety system performs as described once thousands of hours accumulate outside a controlled rollout. A signed multi-year contract can also convert into revenue on a schedule that stretches years past the signing date, or fail to convert at all if a customer's pilot does not meet its own internal bar, neither of which shows up in a headline order-book number. Digit 5 is entering a factory floor that already runs 5 million industrial robots worldwide, most of them the caged, single-task kind Digit 5 is designed to replace, and a humanoid's pitch only works if it can go where those older machines cannot. The number to watch is not the order tally Agility will likely keep publicizing; it is whether early-access customers report incidents once Digit 5 units are working next to people without a cage between them, starting in the first half of 2027, the same kind of after-the-fact scrutiny comma.ai's driver-assistance software is now facing from federal safety regulators once a system built on an internal safety claim meets a wider deployment than the one it was validated on.