Unitree, China’s humanoid robot champion, lists in Shanghai on 19 August after record demand
The Hangzhou firm priced its STAR Market debut at close to $9bn and raised roughly 6.1bn yuan, while retail investors oversubscribed the offer thousands of times over.
August 17, 2026 – 3:11 pm
Credit: Davide Bonaldo / Shutterstock.com
Unitree Robotics, the Hangzhou company that has done more than anyone else to turn Chinese humanoid robots into a spectacle, is due to begin trading on Shanghai’s STAR Market on 19 August. This makes it the first general-purpose humanoid maker to go public on the mainland.
The listing comes after the company cleared paperwork earlier in the year, when valuations looked far more modest. Unitree priced its shares at 150.8 yuan apiece, selling roughly 40mn new shares, about a tenth of the enlarged company, to raise some 6.1bn yuan (around $900mn). This values the business at close to 61bn yuan, near $9bn, comfortably above market expectations.
For a firm that was barely known a few years ago, and one that still sells more robot dogs than androids, it is a remarkable repricing.
Retail investors oversubscribed the offer by more than 8,000 times, a record for the STAR Market, and the overall book was covered several thousand times over, leaving an allocation rate of roughly 0.018 percent.
Grey-market pricing suggests first-day gains of triple to quadruple the offer price, reflecting exuberance rather than a valuation. Chinese new listings returned an average of 233 percent on debut in the first half of 2026.
Also, timed to the opening of the World Robot Conference in Beijing on Monday, two days before the float, Unitree unveiled a new high-speed humanoid nicknamed “Superman”. Built in three months, it can jump two metres and hit 12.66 metres per second, quicker over the ground than Usain Bolt at his peak.
The company describes it as a work in progress, conveniently providing investors with another viral clip to share.
Beneath the spectacle, Unitree has built its reputation on nimble quadruped robot dogs before moving into bipeds. Its G1 and H-series humanoids are now regular features of the internet’s robot video economy, running, dancing, sparring, and even picking themselves up after a shove.
Wang Xingxing, the company founder and China’s first humanoid-robot billionaire (with about a third of the company), has backers including Tencent, Alibaba, and AI upstart DeepSeek.
While revenue has more than quadrupled year on year, Unitree, unusually for the sector, has been profitable for several years. Yet its first-quarter net profit fell sharply, by close to half depending on the filing, as research and marketing spending climbed. This reflects the familiar shape of a company sprinting to stay ahead in a crowded field rather than coasting on fat margins.
The listing is also a national project. Beijing has thrown its weight behind humanoids as a strategic industry, and the debut is seen at home as a milestone for Chinese hardware rather than a mere corporate event. Competition is thickening accordingly.