Chinese robot maker Unitree wins approval to raise $619 million in a Shanghai STAR Market IPO

A Unitree G1 humanoid robot. Credit: Sayanesy via Wikimedia Commons (CC0).

Unitree Robotics has cleared the last regulatory hurdle before going public. China's securities regulator approved the Hangzhou company's IPO on Shanghai's STAR Market on Thursday, and Unitree plans to raise about 4.2 billion yuan, roughly $619 million. It has not set a date or a price yet, and the approval is good for 12 months.

What Unitree makes

Unitree sells robots that move. The business today runs on its four-legged machines, the dog-shaped robots you have seen in research labs, industrial inspections, and the occasional viral clip, plus a newer line of humanoids like the G1 pictured above. Founded in 2016, it also sells the actuators and parts that go into them. This is a company with a shipping product and paying customers, not a pitch deck: it reported 1.69 billion yuan in revenue for 2025, according to Caixin.

That revenue is what separates Unitree from most of the humanoid field, which is still largely demo reels. Unitree sells hardware people can actually buy, and at prices low enough that its quadrupeds turn up in university labs around the world. The humanoids are earlier and far less proven as products, but the company is not starting from zero on manufacturing or on customers.

What the money is for

The prospectus lists four uses for the proceeds: robot AI model research, robot body research, new product development, and a smart-robot manufacturing base. In plainer terms, that is the software that controls the robots, the mechanical engineering of the bodies, new models to sell, and a factory to build them at volume. The manufacturing base is the informative part. You raise to build a factory when you think demand is real and you are supply-constrained, not when you are still looking for the use case.

The number to squint at

Caixin reported the listing could value Unitree around 40 billion yuan, about $5.9 billion. Set against 1.69 billion yuan of 2025 revenue, that is roughly 23 times sales. That multiple is not pricing the quadruped business people are buying today. It is pricing the bet that humanoids turn into a real market and that Unitree is one of the winners. That bet might pay off. It is just worth being clear that the assumption is doing the work here, not the current income statement.

The timing helps the story. China's onshore IPO market has thawed after a long freeze, with A-share listings raising $7.7 billion in the first half of the year, up about 64 percent from a year earlier, per LSEG data. The same week Unitree got its nod, wind-and-solar company China Resources New Energy raised 24.5 billion yuan in Asia's largest IPO of the year and more than doubled on its debut. A hot market is a convenient one to price a robotics narrative into.

The context Beijing cares about

Unitree's listing doubles as a policy proof point. Embodied AI, the industry's term for putting AI models into machines that act in the physical world, is one of the sectors Beijing has pushed hardest, and the STAR Market exists to funnel capital into exactly this kind of company. A strong Unitree debut hands that push a marquee name and a public valuation. A weak one would say something too. Either way, the IPO is a live test of how much investors will pay for robots that, for now, are better at moving than at earning.