Unitree Robotics priced its Shanghai IPO at 150.80 yuan a share on August 6, valuing China's leading humanoid robot maker at roughly $9 billion, with DeepSeek and the state oil giant CNPC both buying in as strategic investors.
The price values Unitree at a price-to-earnings ratio above 219 times, nearly six times the STAR Market's industry average of about 38.6, according to BigGo Finance. That's the number worth sitting with. Investors aren't pricing Unitree on what it earns today. They're pricing it on a bet that humanoid robots become a real industry, and that Unitree gets there first.
The offering raised about 6.1 billion yuan, or $904 million, through the sale of 40.45 million new shares, CNBC reported. Retail subscriptions open August 10. It's the first time any humanoid robot maker has gone public in China, and it capped a marathon 104-day regulatory review, a length that itself signals how carefully Beijing vetted the listing before letting it proceed.
Strategic placements tell you who wants a piece of it. China's National Social Security Fund bought in. So did China National Petroleum Corporation, the country's state oil giant, an odd-looking bedfellow for a robotics startup until you remember CNPC runs some of the most hazardous industrial sites in the country, exactly the kind of environment humanoid robots are pitched to eventually work in.
DeepSeek put in about 140.8 million yuan, roughly $19.6 million, for a 2.31% stake, according to TechNode. Small money by IPO standards. But the two Hangzhou companies signed something bigger alongside it: an agreement to jointly develop AI models for Unitree's robots, with each side agreeing to give the other priority when buying the other's services, DeepSeek's model training on one side, Unitree's robots on the other.
That's the real story here. Two of China's most closely watched AI names, one that stunned Silicon Valley with a cheap open-weight model last year, the other that ships more humanoid robots than any company on earth, are now financially and operationally tied together. If embodied AI is where the next phase of the AI race actually plays out, physical bodies paired with reasoning models, this deal puts Unitree and DeepSeek on the same side of that bet.
Unitree shipped more than 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025, more than any other manufacturer globally, on top of a cumulative base above 30,000 quadruped robots sold since the company's founding, according to Business Model Analyst's research on the filing. Revenue came in around 1.7 billion yuan, about $250 million, up from 392 million yuan the year before, with gross margins near 60%. That's real growth. It's also a business generating a few hundred million dollars a year now being valued at nine billion, a multiple you'd normally expect from a company already selling robots by the hundreds of thousands, not thousands.
Founder Wang Xingxing, 36 years old and Unitree's chairman, general manager, and CTO all at once, holds roughly a third of the company. Forbes puts his personal stake at about $2.4 billion, making him China's first humanoid robot billionaire. He started the company in 2016 building quadruped robots that looked, frankly, like expensive toys to most people watching. They don't look like toys anymore.
What this means for Tesla and Figure #
Every private humanoid robot company on the planet just got a public benchmark, whether it wanted one or not. Tesla's Optimus program and Figure AI have both raised money at eye-catching valuations without a public market ever pricing their shares. Unitree's listing does that in the open, and a 219x multiple sets a marker that both bulls and skeptics will point to for the next year. If Unitree's stock holds up after its trading debut, expected in the days following August 10 as subscriptions clear, it strengthens the case that public investors will pay up for the category. If it doesn't, it becomes the cautionary story every VC memo on humanoid robotics has to address.
Don't mistake the price for a verdict on the technology. Humanoid robots still can't do most of the physical work their promotional videos suggest, and Unitree itself has been candid in past disclosures that only a fraction of its units are doing paid commercial work rather than research and demonstration. The IPO prices optimism, not output. Whether that optimism survives contact with actual earnings reports is the question every investor buying in on August 10 is answering with their money, not their opinion.
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