On July 3, 2026, China’s securities regulator approved Unitree Robotics for a listing on the Shanghai STAR Market. The company plans to raise approximately 4.2 billion yuan — roughly $619 million. From application acceptance on March 20 to CSRC approval on July 2–3, the review took 104 days — the fastest since the STAR Market’s “pre-review” mechanism was introduced, a pace Caixin also called a “record-breaking 104-day approval process”. (Update, August 2026: subscriptions opened August 10 and the offering priced at 150.80 yuan per share on August 6, raising roughly 6.1 billion yuan — well above the original 4.2 billion yuan target — with a Shanghai STAR Market trading debut expected around August 19, not “before the end of July” as originally reported here.)
Unitree builds quadruped robots (Go2, B2) and humanoid robots (H1, G1, H2). You may have seen the videos: robots doing backflips, climbing stairs, doing push-ups alongside humans. What the IPO filing reveals is that behind the demos is a company that is profitable, growing fast, and earning hardware-company margins that most software businesses would envy.
This article is research-based. We are reading the IPO filings, analyst coverage, and developer documentation — not testing robots.
The Numbers That Signal Physical AI Is Real
Unitree’s prospectus figures, as reported by MEXC’s review of the filing and corroborated by KraneShares’ guide to the IPO, show revenue of roughly 1.70 billion yuan (approximately $250 million) for full-year 2025, with net profit of about 278 million yuan (approximately $41 million). This is a profitable hardware company. In robotics, that is unusual.
More striking is the revenue mix shift:
| Period | Humanoid revenue share |
|---|---|
| 2023 | 1.9% |
| 2024 | 27.6% |
| 2025 | 51.5% |
(Figures per the MEXC prospectus breakdown: 1.88% in 2023, 27.68% in 2024, 51.78% in 2025, all full calendar years.)
Humanoid robots went from a rounding error to the majority of Unitree’s business in roughly two years. The company shipped more than 5,500 humanoid units in 2025, a figure also reported independently by the South China Morning Post. Gross margin reached 60.4% for full-year 2025 (59.5% through the first three quarters) — exceptional for a hardware manufacturer, comparable to mature software companies.
The IPO proceeds are earmarked for four uses: developing AI models for robots, researching robot structures, creating new robot products, and building a smart manufacturing facility. In other words: the capital goes into deepening the software and AI layer, not just scaling the factory.
The China Strategic Context
Unitree’s IPO is not just a company milestone. It is a data point in a deliberate national strategy.
China’s 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) names robots — particularly humanoid versions — among the plan’s critical strategic industries, and elevates embodied intelligence to the same tier as quantum technology, brain-computer interfaces, 6G, and nuclear fusion, according to Stanford’s DigiChina analysis of the plan. Separately, China’s 60-billion-yuan ($8.2 billion) national AI fund, jointly built by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Ministry of Finance, has backed specialized manufacturing innovation centers for embodied-AI and humanoid robots as part of its investment priorities.
The scale of the existing lead is significant. According to research firm Omdia, Chinese companies accounted for roughly 87% of the approximately 13,000 humanoid robots shipped globally in 2025, with six named Chinese manufacturers — AgiBot, Unitree, UBTech, Leju Robotics, Engine AI, and Fourier Intelligence — among the leading shipment volumes, well ahead of U.S. makers Figure AI, Agility Robotics, and Tesla, who each shipped roughly 150 units. Beyond Shanghai, Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen run competing municipal programs to attract humanoid-robot industrial clusters, with Hangzhou — home to Unitree itself — also expanding its footprint.
WAIC 2026 opened in Shanghai on July 17 — two weeks after Unitree’s IPO approval — across more than 100,000 square meters of exhibition space with over 300 global product debuts. Physical AI was a major draw on the floor. In his opening keynote, Xi Jinping did not name embodied AI specifically, but he framed AI as “moving from the digital world into the physical world” and centered the speech on global AI governance, including China’s push for a new World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization.
The Developer Platform
Unitree’s robots are not closed platforms. The company publishes unitree_sdk2, an open, CycloneDDS-based C++ SDK, plus a companion unitree_sdk2_python wrapper whose repository covers the A2, B2, G1, Go2, H1, H2, and R1 robot lines.
For builders specifically interested in embodied AI policy training, the unitree_lerobot framework is the relevant integration point. It adapts Hugging Face’s LeRobot training framework — which added full G1 humanoid support in its v0.5.0 release — to convert and train on data collected from Unitree’s G1 dual-arm dexterous-hand setups. If you are building imitation learning or reinforcement learning pipelines, Unitree robots are now a mainstream deployment target with documented integration paths.
The G1 humanoid is ROS2-compatible via the unitree_ros2 package, converting sensor data (cameras, IMU, joint state) to standard ROS messages for integration with SLAM, navigation, and manipulation pipelines. The official G1 developer guide is published at support.unitree.com.
Key platforms for building on Unitree hardware:
- NVIDIA Isaac Sim: Unitree robots are supported for sim-to-real transfer workflows
- LeRobot (Hugging Face): End-to-end embodied AI via
unitree_lerobot - ROS2: Native support on G1 for research and navigation pipelines
- unitree_sdk2: Direct hardware control in Python or C++
What the IPO Signals for Builders
Physical AI has a public market benchmark. Until now, robotics companies have been private-market bets. Unitree joins UBTech, which listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange’s main board in December 2023 as the first publicly-traded humanoid robot company, creating a price signal that venture investors, corporate strategy teams, and acquirers can reference. That benchmark tends to unlock capital in adjacent areas.
The software layer above the hardware is white space. Unitree and its peers are hardware companies. The software they ship — autonomy stacks, manipulation policies, enterprise integrations, fleet management, data pipelines for simulation — is still largely underdeveloped. The pattern is the same as cloud computing: once the infrastructure layer went public, the software layer above it compounded much faster.
Vertical applications are the near-term opportunity. The industries that have placed early orders — manufacturing (inspection, assembly assist), logistics (last-mile and warehouse), and elder care — all have specific workflow software needs. A builder who deeply understands one of those verticals and can wire Unitree’s SDK into it is in an earlier and more defensible position than one building general-purpose robotics tooling.
The compute stack for physical AI is different. On-device inference, multi-modal sensing (depth, force, proprioception), and sub-100ms latency requirements make edge deployment on robotics hardware a distinct engineering problem from cloud-based AI. Builders who develop intuition for edge model optimization, quantization, and real-time control loops are acquiring skills that will compound as the physical AI market grows.
What to Watch
Actual trading date: (Update) Unitree’s debut slipped past July — subscriptions opened August 10, and the IPO priced at 150.80 yuan per share on August 6, with a Shanghai STAR Market trading debut expected around August 19.
WAIC announcements (July 17–20): Unitree is highly likely to exhibit at WAIC. Watch for new product reveals, partnership announcements, or developer program news that could accompany the pre-IPO visibility push.
Figure AI and 1X Technologies: Figure AI (US-based, raised over $1B in a Series C at a $39B post-money valuation in September 2025, confirmed by TechCrunch) and 1X Technologies (Norway, backed by OpenAI since a 2023 funding round and again in its 2024 EQT-led $100M round, as VentureBeat also reported) are the most-watched Western comparables. A Unitree IPO will pressure their investors to clarify timelines or valuations.
API and developer program expansion: IPO proceeds are earmarked for AI model R&D and new products. Watch whether that includes expanded developer tooling, a managed cloud API for the robot fleet, or a simulation environment beyond Isaac Sim.
Gross margin sustainability: 60.4% for full-year 2025 (59.5% through Q3) is high. As competitors scale production and drive down component costs, that margin will face pressure. The rate at which Unitree converts hardware revenue to recurring software or data revenue is the long-term signal.
The core story is straightforward: a profitable hardware company shipping thousands of humanoid robots per year has just received regulatory approval for a $619M IPO on a national exchange, backed by a government plan that treats embodied AI as strategic infrastructure. That is a different category of validation than a Series C or a viral demo. For builders deciding where to invest time in the physical AI stack, the Unitree IPO is a useful calibration point.