Humanoid IPO Wave Hits: Agility SPAC, Unitree IPO, Tesla Factory Shift

In a landmark week for humanoid robotics, three companies made major strides toward public markets. Agility Robotics filed to go public via a SPAC merger with Churchill Capital XI at a $2.5 billion valuation, securing over $620 million in proceeds. CEO Peggy Johnson emphasized that home robots are still '10-plus years' away, focusing Agility's Digit robot on warehouse tasks with a robots-as-a-service model that has already booked $300 million. Unitree cleared its Shanghai IPO approval, aiming to raise about 4.2 billion yuan ($618 million) on the STAR Market at a roughly $5.9 billion valuation. The company is a rare profitable humanoid maker, drawing close attention from Chinese suppliers. Meanwhile, Tesla is converting the assembly line that built its last Model S into an Optimus factory. Elon Musk noted output will start 'quite slow' due to 10,000 all-new parts and no existing supply chain, but the factory conversion is real.

On the software side, Mistral shipped Robostral Navigate, an 8-billion-parameter model enabling robots to navigate using a single RGB camera without lidar or depth sensors. It achieves 76.6% success on the R2R-CE benchmark, outperforming multi-camera depth systems by 4.5 points, and works on wheeled, legged, and flying robots. Other news: OpenAI rolled out GPT-Live with full-duplex voice, Grok 4.5 shipped with Cursor as co-developer (EU access delayed), and UBTech opened sales of its U1 companion humanoid in China for ~$17,650. Nvidia is building Halos safety stack for humanoid robots, and Chinese lidar maker Hesai deepens Nvidia ties despite Pentagon blacklist. The week's moves signal that capital, regulations, and deployment are accelerating.