Unitree Is Going Public With Real Revenue. Figure AI Is Worth $39 Billion Without Any.

On August 5, Unitree Robotics opens its preliminary price inquiry on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's STAR Market. Subscriptions open five days later, on August 10. When the shares start trading, Unitree becomes the first humanoid robot maker anywhere to list on a public exchange - and the first time investors anywhere get an audited look at what it actually costs, and earns, to build and sell humanoid robots at scale.

The numbers behind that listing are the real story. Unitree plans to raise about 4.2 billion yuan (roughly $618 million) by issuing just over 40 million new shares, 10 percent of its enlarged share capital. First-half 2026 revenue is projected between 1.05 and 1.13 billion yuan (about $155 to $166 million), up 35.6 to 45.4 percent year over year. In 2025, the company shipped more than 5,500 humanoid units, more than any other manufacturer in the world, and China-built quadruped robots - Unitree's other product line - captured close to 70 percent of global sales in the first half of this year. Founder Wang Xingxing will keep 65.31 percent of voting control after the float. Regulators approved the listing in 104 days, the fastest full review in STAR Market history, which one Xinhua report framed as recognition of embodied intelligence's strategic importance to Beijing.

A very crowded moment to go public

Unitree isn't stepping into a quiet market. Five weeks before its subscription window opened, two other Chinese humanoid makers hit the same valuation on the same day. On June 29, Shenzhen-based AI² Robotics (unrelated to Seattle's Allen Institute for AI) disclosed a $735 million round valuing it at $2.8 billion, while X Square Robots closed the fourth round in a Series C run that landed it at the identical $2.8 billion mark. AI²'s wheeled AlphaBot line - 34-plus degrees of freedom, a wheeled base instead of legs to simplify both engineering and the path through public-space safety approvals - is backed by a genuinely unusual investor list: state funds like the National Small and Medium Enterprises Development Fund alongside Moutai Group, the liquor conglomerate, and Sino Biopharmaceutical.

Unitree isn't even the only one racing for a stock ticker. LimX Dynamics raised $200 million in a pre-IPO round in July at a $2.21 billion valuation, explicitly positioning for its own public listing. Ant Group, meanwhile, has made a dozen robotics investments since the start of 2025 - Unitree and Galaxea among them - and added humanoid startup Zeroth to that list in early July with a $73.6 million round. "Listing is a must," one Chinese humanoid executive told CNBC of the sudden IPO rush, a sentiment that reads less like ambition and more like a description of how competitive the fundraising environment has become.

The capital math around all of this is large enough to be its own story. Global robotics startups had raised $18.8 billion by late June of this year, according to Crunchbase News - already ahead of the $15 billion the entire sector raised in all of 2025, and past the prior high-water mark of $14.1 billion set in 2021's venture boom, with five months of the year still left to run. China's humanoid robot output alone is projected to top 100,000 units in 2026. None of that includes whatever Unitree raises next week.

The valuation nobody has to prove

Now set that against Figure AI, the Bay Area humanoid maker still widely treated as the sector's bellwether. Figure's valuation was set at $39 billion in a September 2025 Series C that pulled in investors including Nvidia, Microsoft, Brookfield Asset Management, the OpenAI Startup Fund, and Jeff Bezos personally. Figure has never disclosed revenue. Third-party estimates put it in the low tens of millions at best, which would make $39 billion a valuation built almost entirely on a bet about what Figure's robots might eventually do, rather than a record of what they currently earn. That is a perfectly normal way for a private, venture-backed company to be valued. It is also a bet nobody outside Figure's boardroom can actually check.

Unitree is about to lose that shield. Once its shares trade on the STAR Market, its quarterly filings become public record - real shipment volumes, real margins, real R&D spend, all subject to the same disclosure rules that apply to any other listed Chinese company. That is a meaningfully higher bar than a press release announcing a new valuation, and it is a bar Figure, Apptronik, Agility Robotics, and the rest of the venture-funded humanoid field in the US have not had to clear.

What to watch

The interesting question isn't which humanoid maker builds the better robot. It's what happens to the sector's private valuations once one of its biggest players has to publish real numbers every quarter. If Unitree's disclosed margins turn out to be thin - and hardware margins usually are, at this stage of any category - that's a data point every investor pricing Figure, Apptronik, or the next Chinese contender at billions of dollars per funding round will have to reckon with, whether they want to or not. Beijing sped a 104-day regulatory review specifically to get a humanoid maker onto public markets first. Whether that turns into a genuine transparency advantage for Chinese robotics, or whether Silicon Valley's humanoid bets simply keep raising private rounds and skip the public scoreboard altogether, is the thing worth watching once the trading bell actually rings on August 10.

Sources

Xinhua, Unitree Robotics wins approval for STAR Market IPO: https://english.news.cn/20260731/20953e97618041788ceb70d7ee451a02/c.html

Caixin Global, Unitree Robotics Wins Approval for $618 Million STAR Market IPO: https://www.caixinglobal.com/2026-07-03/unitree-robotics-wins-approval-for-618-million-star-market-ipo-102460136.html

SiliconANGLE, Chinese robotics outfits AI2 Robotics and X Square Robots secure funding at $2.8B valuation: https://siliconangle.com/2026/06/29/chinese-robotics-outfits-ai2-robotics-x-square-robots-secure-funding-2-8b-valuation/

Crunchbase News, Robotics startup venture funding surges in 2026: https://news.crunchbase.com/robotics/startup-venture-funding-surges-2026-data/

CNBC, Chinese humanoid startups race toward IPOs: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/13/chinese-humanoid-startups-ipo-limx-unitree.html

Sacra, Figure AI company revenue estimates: https://sacra.com/c/figure-ai/

AI Business, Chinese tech vendors converge on humanoid robotics and embodied AI: https://aibusiness.com/robotics/chinese-tech-vendors-converge-humanoid-robotics-embodied-ai