The current truth about the robotics industry: hardware has been perfected, but commercialization is still waiting for AI models to catch up.

Author: Tanay Jaipuria

Article translated by Schain TechFlow

Unitree Robotics recently submitted an IPO application to the STAR Market of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, aiming to raise $620 million. This prospectus is particularly interesting as it provides a clear view of the current state of the robotics market.

Unitree is already profitable, growing rapidly, and leads the world in humanoid robot shipments.

This article will discuss:

• What does Unitree produce?
• Shift in revenue structure toward humanoid robots
• Who is buying bots (and why)
• Vertical integration strategy
• Financial Status
• The ambition of the model layer

I. What does Unitree produce?

Unitree was founded in 2016 in Hangzhou by Wang Xingxing, a self-taught robotics expert who built the first quadruped robot in his apartment. The company currently has 480 employees, approximately 175 of whom are engaged in research and development.

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 may have seen in viral videos, standing 1.32 meters tall and weighing 35 kilograms.

The company began international sales in 2018. Over 35% of revenue comes from regions outside China, including a significant number of academic clients in the United States.

II. Shift in Revenue Structure Toward Humanoid Robots

Two years ago, Unitree was essentially a robot dog company, primarily selling quadrupedal robots. In 2023, humanoid robots accounted for only 1.9% of revenue.

By the first three quarters of 2025, humanoid robots accounted for more than half of core revenue.

This transformation is driven by improved product-market fit and proactive marketing strategies. The company’s humanoid robots have appeared on China Central Television’s Spring Festival Gala for two consecutive years, one of the world’s most-watched programs. At the 2024 GTC conference, Jensen Huang brought Unitree’s robots onstage.

This brand exposure translated into commercial and scientific demand—something most Chinese hardware companies have never truly achieved.

The shipment data for humanoid robots is particularly impressive. Unitree shipped approximately 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025, making it the world’s largest humanoid robot manufacturer by shipment volume. China’s AgiBot is the closest competitor to this figure. In comparison, U.S.-based companies such as Figure AI and Agility Robotics have shipped only a few hundred units.

The five-year goal in the prospectus is to produce 75,000 humanoid robots and 115,000 quadruped robots annually. This is approximately 14 times the 2025 shipment volume of humanoid robots. The target is aggressive, but it also highlights just how early stage we still are.

III. Who Is Actually Buying the Bots

The prospectus categorizes buyers into three groups: scientific research and education, commercial consumption, and industrial applications.

The reality is that the current demand for humanoid robots primarily comes from scientific research and educational purposes.

1/ Research and education account for 74% of unitree's humanoid robot revenue and shipments. Academic buyers have been Unitree's core support since at least 2022 and remain the company's largest revenue source.

2/ Commercial consumer applications account for 17% of humanoid robot shipments. Non-academic buyers primarily use these robots for "display" purposes—as attention-grabbing promoters in retail stores, tourist attractions, performances, and exhibitions. While consumer revenue grew nearly fourfold year-over-year in the first nine months of 2025, this sounds impressive only because the base was very small. In reality, today’s true use for these $25,000 humanoid robots is simply standing outside a store in Shenzhen to attract tourists.

Industrial applications account for only 9% of humanoid robot shipments. Unitree acknowledges that industrial deployment remains limited due to insufficient technological maturity, reflecting the current state of the technology. Of this 9% in shipments, approximately 50–70% are used in scenarios such as corporate reception and guided tours, meaning that overall, only 3–4% of humanoid robot shipments are genuinely used for tasks like corporate reception and inspection.

In the quadruped robot sector, the situation is better: only about one-third of revenue comes from research, over 40% from commercial applications, and the remainder from industrial uses. Productive use cases here are already relatively mature. Customers include State Grid, China Southern Power Grid, CNPC, Sinopec, Baowu Group, and JD.com (Unitree’s largest customer). These companies deploy quadruped robots in real-world inspection scenarios such as chemical plants, substations, coal mines, and pipelines.

Four: Vertical Integration Strategy

A unique aspect of Unitree is its in-house design and manufacturing of most key components: high-torque motors, precision gearboxes, encoders, joint modules, intelligent controllers, high-precision sensors, dexterous hands, LiDAR, and cameras. According to McKinsey, drive systems—motors, gearboxes, and the joint systems that actually enable robot movement—typically account for 40–60% of a humanoid robot’s total material cost.

Most companies in this field source these components externally, but Unitree manufactures them in-house. External components account for only about 14–18% of total costs. The company outsources only generic parts such as batteries and flash memory, as well as differentiated components like the core computing board.

The unit manufacturing cost of quadruped robots decreased from approximately $3,300 in 2022 to about $1,800 by mid-2025, a 46% reduction. The cost of humanoid robots also declined during the same period, falling from approximately $10,800 to $9,200.

Interestingly, as shown below, the average selling price of quadruped and humanoid robots has also declined significantly each year. However, gross profit margins expanded over the same period, rising from over 40% in 2022–2023 to nearly 60% in 2025, largely due to their vertical integration strategy.

Five: Financial Condition

Revenue grew from $58 million in 2024 to an estimated $252 million in 2025, a 335% increase, primarily driven by strong performance in humanoid robotics. For most of the company’s history, international sales have accounted for more than 55% of revenue. In 2025, the domestic Chinese market surpassed exports for the first time, although the absolute value of export revenue more than doubled year-over-year.

Gross profit margin is close to 60% and has been steadily expanding over the years.

For comparison, most hardware companies have gross margins of 30–40%, while software companies typically achieve 70–80%. Unitree’s gross margin is relatively high for a company selling physical robots, thanks to its vertical integration strategy and currently differentiated products.

The company achieved profitability under GAAP in 2024, with a margin of approximately 18%, and nearly 35% on an adjusted basis.

Unitree's IPO target valuation is approximately $6-7 billion.

Six: The Ambition of the Model Layer

Unitree plans to allocate nearly half of its IPO proceeds to software. Of the $620 million raised, approximately $300 million will be used over the next three years for AI model training, with about $100 million annually invested in what the company calls its "embodied large models."

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, enabling robots to generalize across novel tasks without requiring hand-coded instructions. The second is WMA (World Model + Action), which they view as the more promising direction. The WMA model constructs an internal simulation of physical reality, allowing the robot to predict outcomes before acting, rather than learning solely through trial and error.

They have released the initial versions of both. UnifoLM-WMA-0 was open-sourced in September 2025; UnifoLM-VLA-0 was released in January 2026.

They also outlined the approximate expenditure allocation for the model as follows:

Unitree’s current hardware leadership is real, but the company understands that sustained advantage in robotics may require control over the model layer—the systems that determine what robots do and how they move. Software ambitions also serve as a hedge against commoditization. Unitree has built a moat in hardware manufacturing.

However, if drives and joint modules eventually become standard components, like batteries in electric vehicles, defensibility will shift to the model layer.

Seven, Summary

Unitree has a profitable hardware business, a genuine manufacturing moat, and more humanoid robot shipments than anyone else—at prices others cannot match. However, as the actual use cases of humanoid robots demonstrate, the broader commercial application story is still in its early stages. "Demonstration" use cases dominate consumer demand, while industrial deployments remain narrowly scoped.

Unitree has shown us the current state of the robotics market—there is still much work to be done in terms of models, hardware, and use cases.