Unitree Robotics has priced its initial public offering on Shanghai's STAR Market at 150.8 yuan a share, about 22 US dollars, valuing the Hangzhou company at roughly 61 billion yuan, or close to 9 billion US dollars. It is the first time a maker of humanoid robots has come to a mainland Chinese exchange, and the sale has drawn attention out of proportion to a company whose main products still weigh less than a person and cost less than a car.
Unitree is selling 40.45 million new shares, around 10 percent of its enlarged capital, and expects to raise about 6.1 billion yuan, near 900 million US dollars. Subscriptions open on 10 August. According to CNBC and Caixin, the AI developer DeepSeek is among the strategic investors backing the offering.
Why the listing matters
Unitree built its name on four-legged robots and lower-cost humanoids that undercut Western rivals on price. Bringing that business to public markets gives Chinese investors a direct stake in a field that, in the public imagination at least, has been dominated by American firms such as Figure and Tesla. Bloomberg reported that the company plans to spend the proceeds on robot software and hardware, new products, and a larger manufacturing base.
The timing is deliberate. Beijing has named humanoid robotics a strategic priority, and a domestic listing lets Unitree raise money without the scrutiny a US flotation would invite. The STAR Market, Shanghai's answer to Nasdaq, was built for exactly this kind of loss-making, high-growth technology company.
A young industry going public
For all the enthusiasm, the hardware is early. The verified global fleet of advanced humanoids still numbers in the low hundreds, and most machines need close human supervision to do useful work. A public listing does not change the physics of dexterous manipulation, which remains the field's hardest problem. What it does change is the amount of capital available to chase a solution.
Unitree's debut arrives alongside steady progress in the software that controls these machines, including Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics 2, which extended whole-body control to humanoid platforms earlier this month. The question the market will now price is whether the robots can earn their keep before the money runs out.
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