A humanoid robot company is coming to the stock market

Hey {{first_name|Investor}} -

Note to subscribers: This issue is free for everyone. It's an educational tips piece, my first in a while, and it's arriving today instead of the usual Thursday because the book launch took that slot this week. As a reminder to newbies, Thursday issues are free for all subscribers, Sunday issues dig deeper, and the content tag on each one tells you which you're reading. Now read on for the rest of the issue. 😎

A humanoid robot company is about to become a stock you can buy.

Agility Robotics, maker of a warehouse robot named Digit, agreed in June to go public by merging with Churchill Capital Corp XI ($CCXI). The deal carries a pre-money equity value of about $2.5 billion, and the combined company is expected to trade under the ticker AGLT after closing, planned for later this year. That's new. Regular investors have had no direct way to own a pure-play humanoid maker, and this listing changes how you can play the physical AI theme.

Agility is reaching the market through a SPAC rather than a traditional IPO, so today's issue is a beginner's guide to how these deals work, where the traps hide, and what this one means for the bigger story.

A traditional IPO is the front door of the stock market, and the walk through it is a long inspection. Bankers dig through the books. Lawyers write a thick disclosure document, the SEC reviews it, and institutional investors argue about the price on the road show before the stock ever trades. The process is slow and expensive, and all that friction works in your favor: by the time you can buy a share, professional skeptics have tested the price and the company has shown its math. Companies also face higher legal risk if they sell bold projections on the way in, so IPO pitches lean on results already delivered.

A SPAC is the side door. SPAC stands for special purpose acquisition company: a publicly traded cash shell with one job, merging with a private company. Investors put money in upfront, typically at $10 per share, and the cash sits in a trust, like escrow on a house, until a deal is found. If no deal appears within about two years, the SPAC dissolves and investors get their money back with interest.

When the sponsor finds a target, the two companies agree on a price in a conference room, and shareholders vote. Anyone who dislikes the deal can redeem: hand back their shares for roughly $10 plus accrued interest from the trust. The refund window closes at the merger. Once the deal completes, the private company replaces the shell, the ticker changes, and $CCXI becomes AGLT.

Most deals add a PIPE, extra money committed by big investors alongside the merger. Here the PIPE runs about $200 million at $10 per share, led by Foxconn, the company that assembles iPhones, with insiders committing more than $60 million of it.

Speed: a SPAC merger can close in months instead of a year or more. Certainty: the price is locked up front, so the company knows what it is raising.

The third reason is the one that costs beginners money. SPAC targets are allowed to pitch detailed projections years into the future, so an early-revenue company can sell a hockey-stick chart that would carry real legal risk in an IPO. Those charts are sales material with legal cover, and retail investors get hurt when they read them as forecasts.

SPACs rarely hurt investors because they are complex. They hurt investors because the incentives are misaligned.

The sponsor's cut. Sponsors typically receive founder shares, often around 20% of the SPAC pre-merger, before further dilution from PIPEs and redemptions. It is a finder's fee paid in stock, and the stock comes out of everyone else's slice, so the business has to perform that much better just for you to break even.

Redemptions shrink the pot. If most SPAC shareholders take their $10 back through the refund window, the company receives far less cash than the headline suggests. A high redemption number also means the SPAC's own investors passed on the deal.

Warrants. Many SPACs come with warrants, side tickets that let holders buy more shares later at a set price. More future shares, more future dilution, details buried in the filings.

Watch how those three stack. A SPAC raises $400 million at $10 a share; founder shares add millions of near-free shares, 60% of holders redeem, and the company banks $160 million while warrants wait to dilute again. The business got less money than advertised, your slice got thinner twice, and the sponsor did fine either way.

The track record. Studies of the 2019-2021 wave back this up. One analysis of 236 SPAC mergers found buy-and-hold investors down about 11% on average one year after the deal, through a period when the broader market climbed, and several of that wave's flashiest names, including EV startups, later collapsed or went bankrupt. The doorway was never the opportunity. The business is.

Agility Robotics makes Digit, a two-legged robot built for warehouse and factory work: moving totes, loading containers, feeding production lines.

The evidence so far: the company reports more than 65,000 hours of operation across nine customer facilities. In a field where most humanoid demos are staged videos, paid hours in live buildings count for something. What you will not see yet is proof that Digit deploys at scale with attractive unit economics; that part is still a forward-looking story.

The terms: a $2.5 billion pre-money equity value and more than $620 million in expected gross proceeds, made up of $420 million from the trust if no one redeems plus the roughly $200 million PIPE. Closing is expected later in 2026, pending the shareholder vote and SEC review.

The strategic signal sits in the PIPE. Foxconn, the world's largest contract manufacturer, is leading it, and companies that mass-produce electronics rarely lead nine-figure financings into categories they expect to stay niche.

One more piece of context: Churchill Capital is dealmaker Michael Klein's SPAC series, and the XI means eleventh. Its fourth took EV maker Lucid public in 2021 at the top of the last SPAC wave. Lucid raised real money and built real cars, and the stock still spent the following years far below its early peak. That is a market outcome, not a verdict on the structure, and it carries the lesson anyway: the deal delivers cash, and the business has to deliver everything else.

The S-4, the merger filing the SEC reviews, deserves twenty minutes of your time when it lands. Look for four things: actual revenue, cash burn, how fast management expects deployments to scale, and the fine print on sponsor shares, warrants, and insider lockup dates. Add one more after the vote: the redemption rate. Those five numbers will tell you more than any headline. Read this one with your eyes open.

Until now, you couldn't really buy a humanoid robot maker. Tesla ($TSLA) makes most of its money selling cars, and Figure and Unitree are private. AGLT would open the top of the physical AI stack as one of the first pure-play humanoid listings on a US exchange.

Owning the robot maker is picking a winner. Owning the supply chain is betting the category scales. Whichever robot wins, its joints run on precision screws that someone has to grind, its cameras pass through the same handful of sensor finishers, and its frame starts as steel from a short list of mills. One robot stock is about to soak up enormous attention while the companies that get paid to build every robot keep flying under the radar. Report #1 of the Physical AI Supply Chain series maps that hidden layer from top to bottom, and it is free.

The robot is finally coming to the market. The machine that builds the robot has been sitting there all along.

Before you go, my investing system is now a book. It’s called Make Your Own Alpha. This is the book I wish I had when I started investing twenty years ago. Now you can learn from all my mistakes and experiments. As a bonus, I included the companion workbook that you can use with the book.

Get the Make Your Own Alpha bundle now ➡️

Stay disciplined - Koh

Disclaimer: Nothing in this newsletter constitutes investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Numbers and observations are as of publication. I may hold positions in companies discussed above. Always do your own research and consult a licensed financial advisor before making investment decisions.