AINEWS
The world's biggest humanoid robot maker by sales raised 6.1 billion yuan (about $905 million) in a record shattering IPO on Shanghai's STAR Market — the city's tech focused growth board — with a prototype still in development.
Unitree, the Hangzhou-based maker billed as the world's biggest humanoid-robot company by sales, lists on Shanghai's STAR Market on Wednesday after raising 6.1 billion yuan (about $905 million) in an initial public offering that retail investors oversubscribed by more than 8,000 times. The subscription is a record for the STAR Market, Shanghai's tech-focused board for growth companies, and it landed in a single week. The trading that follows will be the first real measure of how much the world's hottest robotics story is worth to public-market capital.
The product that helped pull the bid together is a prototype nicknamed "Superman," and the visual hook is a standing jump of roughly 2 meters. Unitree posted the demo on Monday, and a syndicated wire report put the company's claims at a top speed of 12.66 meters per second, or roughly 28 miles per hour, with a leg length around 0.85 meters. Unitree says the robot was developed in "just over three months." The company also called the prototype a work in progress that could be improved further in coming months.
That admission is the load-bearing fact for the next month of trading. A three-month development cycle is a pace, not a product line, and the gap between a viral demo and shipped hardware has sunk earlier Chinese hardware debuts. Unitree says it has delivered about 18,000 bipedal humanoids across multiple models as of July 2026, according to a separate post on X. The "Superman" prototype is not part of that count, and the company has not committed a ship date for it. The 8,000-times retail figure is a real demand signal, but it is volatile, and it is not, on its own, a price predictor.
The Shanghai listing is the first by a general-purpose robotics company on a mainland Chinese stock exchange, and the timing lands on the opening day of the World Robot Conference in Beijing, the industry's biggest annual gathering. The STAR50 Index of the board's 50 largest names has rebounded roughly 15% from a three-month low hit in early August, according to the Yahoo Finance syndication of the same wire, which means the retail bid is hitting a recovering sector tape, not a flat one. Off-exchange derivative trading in offshore markets has pointed to a strong debut, which would put Wednesday's print closer to a re-rating event than a discovery auction.
Unitree's backers include Tencent, Alibaba, and DeepSeek. Founder Wang Xingxing sat in the front row at a tech summit attended by Chinese President Xi Jinping last year, according to the ECNS wire report. The Chinese tech outlet ITHome carried the same announcement cycle with the same specs. The combination of heavyweight backers, political access, and retail demand is unusual, and each is doing the work the others cannot.
The test on Wednesday is whether a market that already priced a 6.1 billion yuan raise and an 8,000-times retail bid will underwrite a prototype the company itself is still refining. The number that matters next is the one Unitree reports about delivered units after the listing, not the one it reports before it.