For Agility Robotics’s CFO, a new gig means immediate IPO prep

Michael Beer is new on the job. Like, might-have-trouble-finding-the-bathroom new.

Yet even if he started his new gig as CFO of Agility Robotics, a humanoid robotics company, just a few weeks ago, Beer isn’t remotely new to the top finance seat or high-growth tech companies: Most recently, he served as CFO and head of corporate services at Energy Vault Holdings, an energy storage solutions company.

There was a time, however, when Beer might have had more trouble than just finding the bathroom if he stepped into a finance chief role.

“I didn’t necessarily come up through the Big Four accounting track, nor did I really come up through the more traditional FP&A path,” he told CFO Brew. Instead, Beer spent “15 years on the institutional sell side. Everyone from Goldman Sachs to Benchmark to Bear Stearns to Wolfe Research to Citibank.”

He’s thankful now for the “unique perspective” that the world of investment banking and equity research provided, and his comfort “working with analysts [and] investment bankers [to help] translate external expectations into internal milestones” is about to prove especially useful: In June, Agility Robotics announced its intention to go public via a SPAC merger with Churchill Capital that would value the company at around $2.5 billion.

How’s that for an onboarding task?

Public facing. Beer isn’t totally new to the process. After leaving banking and equity research, he joined Luminar Technologies, which made sensors for autonomous vehicles, when the company was “in stealth, and we raised about $250 million as a private company” before going public “through the SPAC process in December of 2020,” Beer explained. Beer was there until 2021; Luminar filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2025 after losing a contract with Volvo.

Beer’s next experience—he was CFO at FreeWire Technologies, an EV charging company, from 2021 to 2024—continued to expand his understanding of the CFO role. “It’s no longer about just ones and zeros. It’s about looking around corners. It’s about taking a three-year-plus view and understanding the general time which it takes to accomplish some of [a company’s] goals and being able to attune one’s antennae appropriately,” he told us.

And to that end, Beer’s IPO prep work has already started at Agility, in part by simply taking stock of what going public really means in 2026. “A lot of companies do look at going public as a means to an end,” he said. “That’s not our philosophy here.”

“We don’t view this go-public transaction as an exit, by any stretch of the imagination,” he added. “This is really the starting line. It’s a way to facilitate our ability to access capital in the markets, but also to raise our profile with our customers, our vendors.”

Helping hands. Agility, led by former Microsoft exec Peggy Johnson, is going public before other standalone humanoid robotic companies, so “there’s also a thought leadership angle here, in being first, and being able to have a seat at the table as we help shape policy and so forth across a host of different verticals where we’re commercially deploying the product,” Beer added. Amazon.com, GXO, Schaeffler, and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada are customers.

For now, Beer and his team “are heads down on executing on all of the little sub-milestones that go into a successful listing,” he said, adding that the company has filed its S-4 confidentially. While having Churchill Capital as a partner in the process has helped alleviate some of the burden, the other big internal task is “scaling the team for all of those new roles and functions that will certainly be required as a public company.”

“We want finance and accounting to really be that solid foundation,” he added. “We’re very data driven in our approach, and obviously we want to cultivate and engender a lot of trust with the investment community [by] being highly transparent in the way in which we communicate both our milestones and what we hope to achieve in the coming quarters and coming years.”

Relatedly, Beer isn’t particularly fazed by potential changes to the reporting process because of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposal to make quarterly reporting optional.

“We have our own monthly and quarterly close process today as a private company,” he said. “We go through those motions almost regardless [of] who the external audience is.”

“To the extent that companies want to change…their reporting cadence, that’s their decision,” he added. “But we’ll continue to do our normal close process and obviously adhere to all reporting requirements.”

Spoken like an old pro—and not someone who presumably just finished his new hire paperwork.