Agility picks Nyobolt to supply the fast-charging battery behind Digit 5

Agility Robotics has chosen Nyobolt, a battery company based in Cambridge, UK, as the battery technology provider for its Digit 5 humanoid, the companies announced on October 15, 2026. Nyobolt’s pack delivers Digit 5’s rated 90 minutes of work on a 9-minute charge, figures Agility first published when it launched the robot in September. No financial terms were disclosed.

Why it matters: Agility prices Digit 5 against two 10-hour shifts of human labour. That comparison holds only if the robot spends almost no time on the charger, which turns the battery supplier into a load-bearing part of the business case.

Does the Nyobolt deal change Digit 5’s battery numbers?

No. The 90-minute runtime, 9-minute charge and 10:1 ratio are the figures in our Digit 5 launch report, and they reconcile with the hours claim. At 10:1, the arithmetic ceiling is about 21.8 hours of work in 24. Agility’s investor presentation gives a maximum battery output of about 22 hours in 24 for Digit 5, against about 16 for Digit 4. The public claim, “more than 20 hours of productive work,” sits below that ceiling, which leaves room for walking to and docking at the charger. Agility has not broken that time out.

What is new is the supplier, and how much rests on it. “For our customers, Digit’s uptime is the business case,” said Daniel Diez, Agility’s chief business officer. “Nyobolt’s technology was chosen because Digit 5 will need more power from a smaller, lighter pack,” said Sai Shivareddy, Nyobolt’s co-founder and chief executive, adding that Agility “set an exceptionally high bar for what a battery has to withstand in live warehouse and manufacturing environments.” The announcement’s risk language describes Nyobolt as Agility’s exclusive battery technology provider for Digit 5, and lists the risk that it may not supply the quantities needed on the required timeline.

The duty cycle is heavy. At 90 minutes a charge and more than 20 working hours a day, a Digit 5 charges about 13 to 15 times a day, or several thousand times a year. Nyobolt has not published a cycle-life figure for the Digit pack. In its May funding release, it said its battery in Symbotic’s SymBot warehouse robots achieves at least ten times the cycle life of traditional lithium-ion technology.

Why is uptime the unit economics?

Because Agility’s own model is built on hours. The investor-day presentation that Churchill Capital Corp XI filed with the SEC on October 6 gives an illustrative robots-as-a-service price of $8,500 a month, about $100,000 a year. It sets that against a fully burdened labour rate of about $30.50 an hour, derived from the 2025 US Bureau of Labor Statistics wage for material movers plus benefits and wage inflation, and an annual labour cost of about $200,000. The schedule behind it is two 10-hour shifts a day, about 120 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, or about 31,000 hours over a five-year life. Agility labels all of it illustrative.

On those assumptions, the robot costs the customer about $16 an hour, our arithmetic. Digit 4’s ceiling of about 16 hours a day could not cover two 10-hour shifts, so the same subscription would buy fewer hours and the saving would shrink. That is the sense in which the battery is the business case. For scale, one Digit 5 working that schedule would log about half as many hours in five years as Agility’s whole Digit fleet had logged as of May 2026, more than 65,000.

Agility expects early access to Digit 5 in the first half of 2027, with availability increasing over the following six to nine months. Its merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI, whose registration statement was declared effective on October 13, is expected to close in the fourth quarter, with trading on Nasdaq as AGLT; see our listing report.