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Unitree filed to raise about $904M on the Shanghai stock exchange. The prospectus is the first public read on the unit economics behind a 10x surge in Chinese humanoid shipments.
Unitree filed on Friday to raise 6.1 billion yuan, roughly $904 million, in a Shanghai initial public offering, the first time a major Chinese humanoid robot maker has asked public-market investors to price the category.
The Hangzhou-based company's filing is the first public document to put a number on a humanoid race that has been mostly narrative until now. The prospectus discloses 5,511 humanoid units shipped in 2025, a more than tenfold jump from 2024, on revenue of 1.7 billion yuan and a net profit of 278.2 million yuan, per the Forbes account of the Shanghai stock exchange filing. The same filing prices the offering at 150.8 yuan per share across 40.4 million shares.
He founded the firm in 2016 after a brief stint at drone giant DJI. Forbes estimates his pre-IPO stake at about $2.4 billion, which would make him the first billionaire created by a Chinese listed humanoid robot company. That figure is a stake-derived estimate, not realized cash, and it will move with first-day pricing.
Unitree is, in plain terms, a Chinese maker of legged robots. Its catalog spans more than a dozen models, from small quadruped robot dogs (33,000-plus cumulative units sold since founding, per the prospectus) to humanoids and components such as lidar sensors and dexterous robotic hands. The product most likely to register with a non-beat reader is the GD01, a piloted humanoid roughly three meters tall that converts between walking and riding configurations and lists from $650,000. It is, in effect, a robot you can sit in.
The IPO is the first public read on whether the 10x surge in humanoid shipments is the start of a category or a one-year spike. The 2025 numbers tell a specific story: average humanoid selling price landed at 166,400 yuan (about $23,000 at current rates), revenue grew more than 300% year over year, and net profit grew almost 200%. The growth is real. The base is small. 5,511 humanoid units, against a 6.1 billion yuan raise, is the ratio public-market investors will be asked to underwrite, and the prospectus itself does the underwriting work both ways.
In early 2025, Wang was among a small group of Chinese tech figures invited to meet President Xi Jinping. Weeks later, Unitree's humanoids performed a martial arts routine at China's Spring Festival gala, the annual state-television broadcast that sets the agenda for the year. Those appearances are not regulatory disclosures, but they help explain why a category with 5,511 units shipped in 2025 is filing a prospectus in 2026. State visibility turned into a public-market moment.
The company says IPO proceeds will fund new product development and software algorithm refinement, per the prospectus. That is a familiar use-of-proceeds line. The harder question is what the company plans to be: a robotics platform company that ships components and licensing alongside finished units, or a hardware brand racing on price. The prospectus has the unit economics. The post-IPO first-year earnings will decide which reading the market accepts.
If 2026 humanoid shipments do not repeat the 10x step-up, the IPO will mark the moment the Chinese humanoid category failed its public-market test, not the moment it was validated. The 5,511-unit floor is thin for a roughly $904 million raise, and the offer price will only hold if 2026 prints a similar growth curve. That is the actual stakes of the listing: not Wang's paper fortune, but whether the first Chinese humanoid company to go public is also the first to make a category out of a one-year spike.