On June 1, the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s STAR Market listing committee approved Unitree Robotics‘ initial public offering application. The approval came just 73 days after the company’s filing was accepted on March 20, setting a new record for the STAR Market‘s fastest review since its pre-review mechanism was introduced in July 2025.
Unitree plans to raise 4.2 billion yuan ($613 million), implying a valuation of roughly 42 billion yuan ($6.1 billion). The company has already turned a profit — a rarity in the robotics industry — with 2025 revenue rising 335% year-over-year to 1.7 billion yuan, and net profit swinging from a loss of 11 million yuan in 2023 to a profit of 278 million yuan in 2025.
Unitree is one of the few profitable companies in China’s rapidly expanding embodied AI sector.
The Hardware Lead Is Real. The Brain Gap Is Wider.
Unitree‘s revenue growth has been driven by a sharp pivot from quadruped robots to humanoids. The company shipped more than 5,500 humanoid units in 2025, ranking first globally.
In 2025, Chinese manufacturers captured 84.7% of worldwide humanoid robot shipments and over half of the global market value. According to Morgan Stanley, roughly 90% of the 13,000 to 16,000 humanoid robots shipped globally in 2025 came from Chinese manufacturers. Unitree ranked second in global shipments at 4,200 units, behind domestic competitor AgiBot at 5,100 units.
The company‘s full-stack in-house development system — covering joint modules, motors, reducers, LiDAR, and motion control algorithms — has reduced supply chain dependence and shortened product development cycles. Gross margin climbed from 44.2% in 2023 to 60.1% in 2025.
On June 1, NVIDIA announced a partnership with Unitree to launch its first robotics reference design, featuring Unitree’s H2 robot integrated with NVIDIA‘s Jetson Thor hardware and Blackwell GPU. The system will be sold to researchers at institutions including Stanford and ETH Zurich.
But the prospectus acknowledges that during the reporting period, Unitree’s self-developed general embodied large models have not yet been applied at scale to robot products. The company has open-sourced two models — UnifoLM-WMA-0 and UnifoLM-VLA-0 — but they remain experimental rather than production-ready.
The IPO is designed to fix that. Unitree plans to invest 2.02 billion yuan of the 4.2 billion yuan raised into intelligent robot model research and development — nearly half of the total proceeds. The company is moving from “hardware-first” to “brain-first,” but the transition is still in its early stages.
Who‘s Buying the Robots?
Unitree’s humanoid robot revenue exceeded its quadruped robot revenue for the first time in 2025, reaching 868 million yuan and accounting for 51.8% of main business income. But the customer base tells a more nuanced story: roughly 74% of revenue comes from research and education, with commercial consumer applications at 17% and industrial applications at only 9%.
This is not unusual for a company at this stage. But it is a reminder that the distinction between “selling robots” and “selling solutions” remains wide.
P.S. The approval came in 73 days. The humanoid revenue overtook quadruped revenue in 2025. The brain is still being built. Three numbers, one story: Unitree has won the hardware race. The brain race is still undecided. The valuation reflects the hardware win and the brain bet. Investors will need to decide which one matters more.
