Agility Robotics Makes Public Debut as Humanoids Scale

0:00 Agility Robotics is betting humanoid robots can become a big business. Now Wall Street gets to weigh in. The company going public and begins trading on the Nasdaq today under the ticker AGLT. Joining us now is Agility's CEO, Peggy Johnson. Peggy, today's market move notwithstanding and what happened in the election this week. We'll we'll get to that in in just a second. Big picture, why is now the right time to test investor appetite for a humanoid robot company?

0:27 Well, thanks for having me. Now is the right time because we have customer commitments. We have pending orders. We are scaling up manufacturing, and all of this is focused on filling the labor gap that is growing by the day. It's very hard to fill these tasks that are physically challenging, repetitive, very injury prone at times, and Agility's Digit robot is ready to step in and do that. This is the first dedicated humanoid company to go public in The US. It's certainly a major milestone for for a category that I think for a lot of people and including investors still has has a lot to prove. On the timing of this, with the route that we're seeing in markets today and this week, the changing of the guard in Washington in the house and the senate come January. Was this still a good time to debut?

1:20 Well, you know, the market will move by the minute, but we are building a business for the next decade, and we are in it for the long run. I will say even with the changing of the guard, robotics is a very bipartisan issue. Both sides recognize the growing labor gap. And as we move to reassure more manufacturing into The US, we are gonna need robots like Digit to help us augment the scarce human labor that we have to step into these roles. So for us, it's the right time. We're well capitalized.

1:55 We're already working. And while it may be the early innings for this business, we are already on the field and playing. Do you mean with GXO Logistics? Where else? GXO Logistics is one of our customers, and in fact, they just doubled down. They are now deploying into two additional facilities beyond the Georgia facility that we have been operating at. We have Scheffler who has deployed robots in their North Carolina plants. A number of customers that we have brought on over... Just over the last few months, another four additional customers including AGCO, an agricultural manufacturing company. It's a new category for us that is looking to bring robots on into their Heston, Kansas facility.

2:43 You know, one thing I wonder about when it comes to humanoid robots working alongside actual human beings is from a psychological perspective and and and from a safety perspective, how you ensure that it's it's done in a way that that actually works. Right. We need to augment what humans are doing. And so you can think of the robot as helping the humans do the task, offload the tasks that are physically challenging for them. One of the things that we did with our next generation robot, digit five, is make it safe. It... Be cooperatively operating in close proximity with humans. So up until now, all humanoids have been limited to operations inside of fenced off areas, typically doing a single task at a time. Now with DIGIT five, our next gen that'll be available the first half of next year, DIGIT comes out of the work cell and can take on a number of different tasks throughout the facility and also can operate through several shifts because of a fast charge battery that we have deployed in Digit five. So we've really stepped up to the needs of our customers. We're listening to them, and we're continuing to build in the features that they need get the job done.

4:02 Why not stay private for for longer? You know, this is still an emerging category. Deployments are are still limited. Why why not stay private and and avoid the scrutiny being publicly traded until you're you're bigger and you have more customers? We decided to go public, and we went forward with Churchill Capital Eleven. We combined with the business yesterday. We have a growing pipeline of customers that we needed to accelerate our ability to deliver upon. We've already have 30 customers in our pipeline that'll grow to over a 100 by the end of next year. This is an existential problem for many companies who can't find this labor. So the time was now. We have 300,000,000 in pending orders.

4:47 We're ramping up our factory, which can make a total of 10,000 units annually, and we didn't wanna wait any longer. We wanted to get the resources that we need in order to scale properly.