Author:Tanay Jaipuria
Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow
Deep Tide Guide: Unitree robotics is about to conduct an IPO on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's Sci-Tech Innovation Board, raising $620 million. The prospectus reveals for the first time the complete financial data of a profitable robot company. The company shipped 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025, ranking first globally, but 74% were sold to universities for research, with genuine industrial applications accounting for only 9%—this is the current reality of the robotics industry: hardware is ready, but commercialization is waiting for AI models to catch up.
Unitree Robotics recently submitted an IPO application to the Shanghai Stock Exchange's Sci-Tech Innovation Board, planning to raise $620 million. This prospectus is quite interesting because it gives us a clear view of the current state of the robot market.
Unitree is already profitable, growing rapidly, and leads in global humanoid robot shipments.
This article will discuss:
- What Unitree produces
- The shift in revenue structure towards humanoid robots
- Who is buying robots (and why)
- The vertical integration strategy
- Financial status
- Ambitions at the model layer
1. What Unitree Produces
Unitree was founded in 2016 and is based in Hangzhou. Its founder, Wang Xingxing, is a self-taught robotics expert who built the first quadruped robot in his own apartment. The company currently has 480 employees, with about 175 engaged in R&D.
The company sells two product lines:
Quadruped Robots: Go2 (consumer and research grade), B2 (industrial grade), and A2
Humanoid Robots: H1, H2, G1, and R1. The G1 is the one you might have seen in viral videos, standing 1.32 meters tall and weighing 35 kg.
The company began international sales in 2018. Over 35% of revenue comes from outside China, including a significant number of academic customers in the US.
2. The Shift in Revenue Structure Towards Humanoid Robots
Two years ago, Unitree was essentially a robot dog company, primarily selling quadruped robots. Humanoid robots accounted for only 1.9% of revenue in 2023.
By the first three quarters of 2025, humanoid robots already accounted for over half of core revenue.
This shift was driven by improved product-market fit and aggressive marketing. The company's humanoid robots have appeared on CCTV's Spring Festival Gala for two consecutive years, one of the most-watched programs globally. Jensen Huang brought Unitree robots on stage at the 2024 GTC conference.
This brand exposure translated into commercial and research demand, something most Chinese hardware companies have never truly achieved.
The shipment data for humanoid robots is particularly impressive. Unitree shipped about 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025, making it the world's largest manufacturer of humanoid robots by shipment volume. China's Zhiyuan Robotics comes closest to this number. In contrast, well-known US companies like Figure AI and Agility Robotics have only shipped in the hundreds.
The 5-year target in the prospectus is an annual production capacity of 75,000 humanoid robots and 115,000 quadruped robots. This is about 14 times the humanoid robot shipments in 2025. The goal is aggressive but also highlights how early stage we still are.
3. Who is Really Buying Robots
The prospectus categorizes buyers into three types: Research & Education, Commercial & Consumer, and Industrial Applications.
The reality is that most current demand for humanoid robots comes from research and education purposes.
1/ Research & Education accounts for 74% of humanoid robot revenue/shipments. Academic buyers have been Unitree's core support since at least 2022 and remain the company's largest revenue source.
2/ Commercial & Consumer accounts for 17% of humanoid robot shipments. Non-academic consumers who buy these robots mainly use them for "showcasing": acting as eye-catching promoters in retail stores, tourist spots, performances, and exhibitions. Consumer revenue grew nearly fourfold year-on-year in the first nine months of 2025, which sounds impressive, but the base was actually very small. In reality, the practical use of a $25,000 humanoid robot today is to stand at the entrance of a store in Shenzhen attracting tourists.
3/ Industrial Applications account for only 9% of humanoid robot shipments. Unitree acknowledges that industrial deployment is more limited because the technology is not yet mature enough, which illustrates the current technological state. Within this 9% of shipments, about 50-70% are used in scenarios like corporate reception and guiding tours. So overall, only 3-4% of humanoid robot shipments are genuinely used for work like corporate reception and inspection.
For quadruped robots, the situation is better: only about one-third of revenue comes from research, over 40% from commercial use, and the rest from industrial use. Productive use cases there are relatively more mature. Clients include State Grid, Southern Grid, PetroChina, Sinopec, Baowu Group, and JD.com (Unitree's largest customer). These companies use quadruped robots for real inspection scenarios in chemical plants, substations, coal mines, pipelines, etc.
4. Vertical Integration Strategy
A unique aspect of Unitree is that it independently designs and manufactures most of its key components: high-torque motors, precision reducers, encoders, joint modules, intelligent controllers, high-precision sensors, dexterous hands, lidars, and cameras. According to McKinsey data, the drive system (motors, reducers, and the joint systems that actually make the robot move) typically accounts for 40-60% of the total BOM cost of a humanoid robot.
Most companies in this field source these components externally, but Unitree manufactures them itself. Outsourced components account for only about 14-18% of the total cost. What it outsources are only generic parts like batteries, flash memory, and differentiated parts like the core computing board.
The unit manufacturing cost for quadruped robots has decreased from about $3,300 in 2022 to about $1,800 in mid-2025, a 46% reduction. Humanoid robot costs have also decreased, from about $10,800 to $9,200 over the same period.
Interestingly, as shown in the chart below, the average selling prices for both quadruped and humanoid robots have also dropped significantly year by year. However, gross margins have actually expanded over the period, rising from the low 40s in 2022-2023 to nearly 60% in 2025, largely due to their vertical integration strategy.
5. Financial Status
Revenue grew from $58 million in 2024 to an estimated ~$252 million in 2025, a 335% increase, primarily driven by strong performance in humanoid robots. For most of the company's history, international sales accounted for over 55% of revenue. In 2025, the domestic Chinese market surpassed exports for the first time, although the absolute value of export revenue still more than doubled year-on-year.
Gross margins are close to 60% and have been expanding over the years.
For comparison: Most hardware companies have gross margins of 30-40%. Software companies typically achieve 70-80%. For a company selling physical robots, Unitree's gross margins are relatively high, benefiting from their vertical integration strategy and currently relatively differentiated products.
The company became profitable on a GAAP basis in 2024, with a profit margin of about 18%, and close to 35% on an adjusted basis.
Unitree's IPO target valuation is approximately $6-7 billion.
6. Ambitions at the Model Layer
Unitree plans to allocate nearly half of the IPO proceeds to software. Out of the $620 million raised, about $300 million will be used for AI model training over the next three years, with approximately $100 million invested annually in what the company calls the "Embodied Large Model."
The prospectus describes two parallel model architectures. The first is VLA (Vision-Language-Action): a model that directly maps visual and language inputs to motor commands, allowing the robot to generalize to unfamiliar tasks without manually coded instructions. The second is WMA (World Model + Action), which is their preferred direction. The WMA model builds an internal simulation of physical reality. The robot predicts what will happen before acting, rather than learning purely through trial and error.
They have already released initial versions of both. They open-sourced UnifoLM-WMA-0 in September 2025; UnifoLM-VLA-0 was released in January 2026.
They also detailed the approximate allocation of spending on the model side, as shown below:
Unitree's current hardware leadership is real, but the company understands that lasting advantage in robotics may require control over the model layer: the systems that decide what the robot does and how it moves. Software ambition is also a hedge against commoditization. Unitree has built a moat in hardware manufacturing.
But if actuators and joint modules eventually become standard components like batteries in electric vehicles, then defensibility shifts to the model layer.
7. Summary
Unitree has a profitable hardware business, a genuine manufacturing moat, and ships more humanoid robots than anyone else, at prices others cannot match. But as the actual usage patterns of humanoid robots show, the story of widespread commercial application is still in its early stages. "Showcase" use cases dominate consumer demand, and industrial deployment is narrow.
Unitree gives us a glimpse of the current state of the robotics market; there is still much work to be done in models, hardware, and use cases. If you're building in robotics and embodied AI, feel free to reach out at tanay at wing.vc.
