Published on Aug. 18, 2026

China's capital market has found a new favorite. On August 10, Unitree Robotics opened the subscription for its initial public offering on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's STAR Market, and the retail tranche alone was oversubscribed more than 8,000 times, the company said. The listing will also make Unitree the first mainland-listed manufacturer of humanoid robots, reported Reuters on August 10, 2026.

For retail investors, it was something like a robotics lottery. The chance of actually being allotted shares stood at 0.02 percent, wrote the Chinese tech portal 36Kr.

The Hangzhou-based robot maker is selling about 40.45 million shares, a tenth of its post-offering share capital, at 150.80 yuan (roughly US$22) apiece, and it expects to raise about 6.1 billion yuan (roughly US$904 million), reported the state news agency Xinhua on August 11, 2026. This was much more than it had aimed for in its first filing.

About 4.2 billion yuan of the proceeds are earmarked for four projects, covering research on robot AI models, robot-body development, new robot products and a new manufacturing base, according to the IPO prospectus.
At the issue price, Unitree is valued at about 61 billion yuan (roughly US$9 billion). Early backers think that this is only the beginning of a meteoric rise, however. "It is very reasonable for its market cap to exceed 200 billion yuan after listing, and I think it may even exceed 400 billion yuan in the short term.

This is not exaggerated compared with the valuation of similar overseas companies," Yu Wenchao, an early Unitree investor and partner at Dunhong Asset, told 36Kr. The upper end of that range equals roughly US$59 billion.
No hardware company has ever drawn this much public excitement and this high a valuation on annual revenue barely above one billion yuan. The IPO prices Unitree at 219 times its 2025 earnings and 36 times its sales, as Reuters pointed out.

The average price-to-earnings ratio in Unitree's official peer group, general equipment manufacturing, stands at 38.56, which means investors are paying almost six times the customary multiple. The listing also hands humanoid robotics its first publicly traded valuation benchmark, wrote the Chinese news portal Jiemian News.

The appetite of investors, and the worldwide media coverage of the listing, show how much the world is warming to physical AI, the marriage of artificial intelligence with machines that move through the real world. Goldman Sachs argued in a report that US and North Asian tech companies dominate semiconductors and AI models, while China's opportunities are concentrated in power, infrastructure and physical AI.

For founder Wang Xingxing, the frenzy completes a reversal that few in China's venture industry saw coming. When an investment team from Tencent visited him in March 2019, Unitree had only a few hundred thousand yuan left in its account. Wang showed no sign of anxiety, wrote 36Kr. Backing him, however, was no mainstream choice at the time.

One of Wang's competitors was the darling of early investors. Hangzhou housed a second robotics company, Deep Robotics, celebrated as "China's Boston Dynamics". Its founder Zhu Qiuguo, a professor at Zhejiang University's College of Control Science and Engineering, was famous in the industry and never short of capital. In 2019, investors valued Deep Robotics at 200 to 300 million yuan, more than twice Unitree's level.

Our Unitree founder Wang, a graduate of Shanghai University who had spent three months at drone maker DJI, struck financiers as inconspicuous. Tian Jiangchuan, managing partner of In Capital, jotted "grassroots background" into her meeting notes.

Asked how quadruped robots would ever make money, Wang answered that they could climb the stairs of walk-up apartment blocks to deliver parcels, a reply that made investors shake their heads, wrote 36Kr. Tian later blamed her own "arrogance of elitism" for passing on the company.

The doubters overlooked the independence of Wang's technical judgment. Around 2016, when Unitree was founded, most Chinese robotics firms copied the hydraulic actuators of Boston Dynamics. "At that time, everyone just copied from the United States," an early Unitree investor told 36Kr.

Wang refused to follow. Hydraulics would never succeed, he argued at the time; the high-precision hydraulic rods exceeded the fine machining skills of Chinese suppliers, their cost would never fall, and their control was too crude for delicate movements. He built his robots around electric motors, accepting lower peak power in exchange for low cost and high precision.

In April 2024, Boston Dynamics retired the hydraulic version of its Atlas robot and switched to the electric drive Unitree had bet on since 2016. Wang's choice was validated by one of the world's leading robot makers.

The second lonely decision concerned the joints. Chinese startups that followed Unitree into electric drives combined high-speed motors from the Swiss manufacturer Maxon with harmonic reducers, gearboxes that multiply torque dozens or hundreds of times.

Unitree went the opposite way and paired low-speed, high-torque motors with simple planetary reducers, a concept known as quasi-direct drive. Harmonic reducers are delicate, their wafer-thin gear rings can crack when dropped, and a single unit often costs thousands of yuan. A planetary reducer is a rugged standard part that sells for tens of yuan, Chinese sources reveal.

The third decision overturned a layout the industry had borrowed from the Swiss company ANYbotics, with two motors on the thigh and one on the knee, which makes the lower leg heavy and wastes energy.

Unitree concentrated all motors at the hip joint and left only a light connecting rod below, so its robots run farther and are easier to maintain. "After I saw its structure, I thought it was a genius design. It must have gone through many iterations, and finally found that this structure is the best," Zhou Hualin, investment director at Tencent Investment, told 36Kr.

Most Chinese legged robots now follow Unitree's blueprint of electric drives, planetary reducers and hip-mounted motors.

Being years ahead of the mainstream carried a price. Unitree found no suppliers for its core parts. Practitioners remember the quadruped supply chain of those years as "almost non-existent", and the motors Wang wanted, low-speed, high-torque and half the weight of the industry benchmark, existed nowhere as standard products.

"When we knocked on the doors of listed companies like Wolong and Mingstar, they didn't even bother to talk to us," a former employee told 36Kr.
Wang drew a conclusion that shapes Unitree to this day. "A complete machine manufacturer must be like Apple, mastering core technologies by itself, so as to reshape the supply chain according to its own ideas, instead of being constrained by suppliers," 36Kr quoted him as saying.

Since he could not buy the motors he wanted, he bought silicon steel sheets and copper wire and wound them by hand.

The IPO also measures how far China's robotics industry has come in three years. Robotics has been written into the 15th Five-Year Plan, state capital has poured into the field, and financing in the embodied-intelligence sector has surged. In the first half of 2026 alone, funding passed 34.5 billion yuan (roughly US$5.1 billion), according to UBS figures.

The subscriber list reads like a directory of corporate China. Strategic investors include the National Council for Social Security Fund, the AI developer DeepSeek, and investment arms or affiliates of China National Petroleum Corp, China Southern Power Grid, China Telecom, Tencent and CITIC Securities.

The pension fund is the largest strategic subscriber, taking 2.31 percent of the offering for about 141 million yuan (roughly US$21 million). The state's direct stake is small, 0.67 percent of shares held through Shenzhen Capital Group and its subsidiary, while state-backed funds hold larger positions, led by the Beijing Robotics Industry Development Fund with 3.83 percent and the China Internet Investment Fund with 2.11 percent, according to prospectus figures. Meituan, the food-delivery group, is the largest outside investor with 9.65 percent. Wang remains the controlling shareholder.

Behind the frenzy stands a business that still earns most of its money with robot dogs. From 2023 to 2025, Unitree sold 33,294 quadruped robots and 5,632 humanoids, according to its prospectus. Humanoid shipments passed 5,500 units in 2025, the highest figure in the world, Wang says. Revenue rose more than fourfold to 1.7 billion yuan (roughly US$252 million) last year, from just under 400 million yuan in 2024, and the company is profitable, a rarity among humanoid startups, with an adjusted net profit of about 600 million yuan, reported Reuters. Overseas customers contributed more than 40 percent of sales.

The global sales crown for humanoid robots, however, recently changed hands. In the first half of 2026, Shanghai-based AgiBot shipped about 8,400 humanoid robots and took the top spot worldwide with a market share of 44 percent, while Unitree shipped about 5,900 units for a share of 31 percent, according to the research firm Smart Analytics Global.

AgiBot grew its shipments by 562 percent year on year, helped by a lineup that ranges from full-size bipedal machines to compact and wheeled models. Together the two rivals accounted for roughly three quarters of the 19,100 humanoid robots shipped worldwide in those six months, a global figure that itself rose 272 percent within a year.

Deep Robotics, the company of Zhejiang University professor Zhu Qiuguo that investors once preferred over Unitree, filed its prospectus in May for a Shanghai listing of about 2.5 billion yuan (roughly US$368 million), reported Caixin. The professor's company now follows the outsider to the exchange.
Rivals are lining up for their own IPOs. Leju Robotics, maker of the Kuavo humanoid, filed in May for a listing on Shenzhen's ChiNext board, and AgiBot began preparing a Hong Kong IPO in July, according to various media reports.

The whole industry is watching Unitree's ticker. If the company sustains a market value in the hundreds of billions of yuan, every investor who has funded embodied-intelligence startups at ambitious valuations will feel vindicated, while a fall below the issue price could raise doubts.