News
What's happening in robotics and AI — curated by the wujec.ai editors.
The working humanoid goes public: Agility Robotics takes a $2.5bn SPAC deal, with Foxconn leading the money
Agility Robotics announced on 24 June 2026 that it will go public through a merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI, at a $2.5 billion pre-money equity value and more than $620 million in gross proceeds — $420 million from the SPAC's trust account and roughly $200 million of PIPE financing at $10 a share, led by Foxconn. The combined company is to trade as AGLT, with closing expected during 2026 subject to shareholder approval and regulatory clearance. What makes the filing unusual for this sector is that it contains operating history rather than promises. Agility disclosed four named customers in active deployment — Schaeffler, GXO, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada and Mercado Libre — across nine facilities, with more than 65,000 cumulative hours of robot operation and a pipeline of over 30 potential customers. In November 2025 a single GXO deployment in Flowery Branch passed 100,000 totes moved. The order book, however, points forward, not at the robot doing that work. More than $300 million in multi-year orders, subject to contractual milestones, is booked against Digit v5 — the next-generation machine Agility bills as the first "cooperatively safe" humanoid, and the first production platform for NVIDIA's Halos for Robotics safety stack. "Humanoids are at a meaningful inflection point in commercial adoption," said chief executive Peggy Johnson. Co-founder Jonathan Hurst put the thesis more narrowly: "Cooperative safety is the critical unlock for scaled humanoid adoption." Foxconn's presence at the head of the PIPE is the other half of that thesis — the contract manufacturer that builds iPhones is betting the next phase is volume production, not research.
Digit →NVIDIA gives humanoids a safety processor that the AI cannot override — Agility is first in line
NVIDIA announced Halos for Robotics on 22 June 2026, a full-stack safety architecture aimed squarely at the reason humanoid robots still work behind fences: nobody can certify a neural network as the thing that stops a machine before it hits a person. Halos separates the two jobs. The hardware layer is the industrial IGX Thor compute module, which carries a functional-safety island — an isolated processor, assessed against IEC 61508, that can halt the robot independently of the AI stack doing perception and planning. Above it sit Halos Core and Halos OS, plus an "outside-in" blueprint in which cameras mounted in the building, rather than on the robot, feed AI agents that see around corners and modulate the robot's speed as people approach. NVIDIA says the architecture is derived from its automotive safety work, and it has paired the launch with an ANAB-accredited inspection lab and certification partners including TÜV Rheinland, UL Solutions, TÜV SÜD, exida, SGS and CertX. Supported standards named at launch include IEC 61508, ISO 13849 and ISO/IEC TR 5469. Agility Robotics is the first production user, integrating IGX Thor and Halos Core into Digit — the humanoid already working for Amazon, GXO, Schaeffler and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada. It is the foundation of what Agility calls "cooperative safety" in the forthcoming Digit v5: sharing unmodified floor space with workers, no safety cage. The telling detail is the guest list. Six certification bodies and an accredited lab say plainly what the bottleneck for humanoids on a factory floor actually is — not autonomy, not dexterity, but a signature from a certifier.
Digit v5 →