MetaEra: Utree IPO Wealth Feast, Only a Few Profit

In the winter of 2017, Wang Xingxing took a 10-hour train ride from Hangzhou to Beijing, holding a robot dog for a pitch路演, as the company was nearly unable to pay salaries. Nine years later, Unitree Technology is set to become the first humanoid robot company listed on China’s A-share market, with an offering price of RMB 150.80 per share and a valuation of approximately RMB 61 billion. Early investors have seen substantial returns: Yin Fangming’s angel investment yielded roughly a 100-fold return, while Meituan’s stake corresponds to a market value exceeding RMB 4 billion. For the private market, Unitree’s valuation serves as a key benchmark; however, the public market remains divided on the concept of embodied intelligence, with capital primarily betting on the future potential of general-purpose embodied large models—Unitree’s current profitability still relies heavily on its robot dogs. Tesla’s Optimus progress remains a critical industry variable, and Unitree’s post-listing performance faces multiple uncertainties.

Article author and source: Wall Street Journal

In the winter of 2017, due to high-speed rail regulations prohibiting large-capacity lithium batteries, Wang Xingxing boarded a train for over ten hours, carrying a robot dog from Hangzhou to Beijing to pitch to Sequoia China. At that time, his company was nearly out of funds to pay salaries.

Nine years later, Unitree Technologies is set to become China’s first humanoid robot company listed on the A-share market. The latest update reveals that on August 6, Unitree announced its offering price at RMB 150.80 per share, with an online roadshow on the 7th, and online subscription opening on the 10th.

Many expect its market capitalization to surpass 100 billion yuan. Several secondary market professionals told Tencent Technology the same view: although stock market volatility has been significant recently, Yu Shu’s IPO will still be highly sought after, “because people believe that as an industry supported by policy, the market leader is bound to rise.”

According to the prospectus, the company is issuing 40.4464 million new shares, representing 10% of the total post-offering share capital. On August 6, the final offering price was set at RMB 150.80 per share, raising approximately RMB 6.1 billion and valuing the company at approximately RMB 61 billion post-offering. The initial online offering amounted to only 6.471 million shares, which, at 500 shares per subscription unit, resulted in just 12,942 winning numbers available across the entire market—fewer than 13,000. This means that for every 10,000 valid subscription allocations, only about two winning numbers are allocated.

In incomplete statistics, over the past two years, more than 300 startups have emerged in China’s embodied AI industry. By this August, at least five companies had valuations exceeding RMB 20 billion, and nearly 50 companies were preparing for listings on the Hong Kong or A-share markets. For these companies, Unitree’s stock price will serve as a valuation benchmark for the A-share market and a reference point for the Hong Kong market.

This is a critical moment—yet a disconnect is emerging between the wealth creation in the primary market fueled by the concept of embodied intelligence and the realities of the secondary market.

Wang Xingxing does not fit the typical profile of a hard tech entrepreneur—this became the basis for Unitree’s early investors’ contrarian bet.

He graduated from Shanghai University with an unremarkable resume. During early fundraising, he faced repeated rejections. During the golden decade of internet business model innovation, venture capitalists relied on templates for evaluating founders: elite backgrounds from top universities, executives from major tech companies, returnee professionals, or serial entrepreneurs. These criteria ensured a minimum baseline for startup projects but also filtered out entrepreneurs like Wang Xingxing.

Partner at Chuxin Capital, Tian Jiangchuan, has publicly reflected on this experience. At the end of 2017, Tian first met Wang Xingxing at a café in Hangzhou. At the time, Unitree’s product already demonstrated an extreme focus on cost reduction and a differentiated technological approach, but Tian ultimately decided against investing. “Looking back, the main issue was my ‘elitist arrogance’: Xingxing graduated from Shanghai University, and I believed the robotics industry required graduates from top-tier institutions,” Tian later admitted. It wasn’t until 2020 that Chuxin Capital re-invested in Unitree—at more than four times the original valuation.

An investor who has followed China's robotics sector for over a decade told Tencent Technology that when Unitree was founded, the quadruped robot sector received little attention in China, and very few institutions had engaged with it in its early stages.

Time rewarded the earliest “contrarians.” In 2016, Yin Fangming, formerly employed at MediaTek, Sogou, and Qihoo 360, made a RMB 2 million angel investment and acquired a 15% equity stake in Unitree Robotics. This investment corresponded to a post-money valuation of only RMB 13.33 million. Today, this investment is held indirectly through the holding platform Tianjin Junwan Hongyi, which owns 3.0699% of Unitree Robotics, making it the company’s tenth-largest shareholder. After piercing through the structure, Yin Fangming indirectly holds approximately 0.46% of Unitree. Based on the initial offering valuation of RMB 42 billion, the implied book value of Yin’s indirect stake is approximately RMB 200 million, representing a total return of about 100 times. In 2025, he prematurely realized RMB 58 million by selling a portion of his existing shares.

In terms of return multiples, the institution with the highest multiple is Variable Capital. This early-stage fund invested just RMB 2.09 million in Unitree Technologies’ seed round in 2018, achieving a return multiple of 174.62x to date; including exited portions, the total return amounts to approximately RMB 364 million.

Sequoia China’s return multiple is also impressive. Wang Xing’s pitch, earned from that train journey, prompted Sequoia Capital’s seed fund to immediately issue a letter of intent. This $15 million investment corresponded to a post-money valuation of just RMB 150 million. After multiple rounds of additional funding, Sequoia China has invested approximately RMB 102 million in total and currently holds a 7.11% stake. Based on the IPO valuation of RMB 42 billion, its implied market value is approximately RMB 2.98 billion, with an absolute gain exceeding RMB 2.5 billion.

Meituan is the institution that has earned the highest absolute amount. Through entities such as Hanhai Information and Chengdu Longzhu, Meituan holds a combined 9.65% stake in Unitree Robotics, making it the largest external institutional shareholder. Based on the issuance valuation, Meituan’s stake corresponds to a market value of approximately RMB 4.05 billion. Considering its cumulative investment of about RMB 400 million in the B2 round and other rounds in 2024, Meituan’s paper return exceeds RMB 3.6 billion.

Wang Xinyu, partner at Meituan Longzhu, met Wang Xing in his first week of work in 2016, but did not invest in him until 2024. At the end of 2023, Wang Xinyu traveled to the United States to research robotics labs at top universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, and discovered that these institutions, representing the world’s most advanced research capabilities, were all using Unitree’s robot dogs for secondary development. “If the best PhD students worldwide are using Unitree’s robots for cutting-edge research, how could its AI capabilities remain unsolved?” Wang Xinyu once said in a media interview.

Other investors who joined during the early or mid-stages have also realized substantial gains. Matrix Partners entered during the Series B round around a valuation of RMB 1.12 billion and currently holds 5.45% of the equity, corresponding to a market value of approximately RMB 2.29 billion, yielding a paper return multiple of about 45x. Shunwei Capital first invested in January 2021 at a valuation of RMB 380 million and now holds 3.98%, equivalent to a market value of about RMB 1.67 billion, with a paper return multiple of approximately 26x. CITIC Group participated in the Series B2 round in 2024 and currently holds 4.49%, corresponding to a market value of approximately RMB 1.88 billion. Shenzhen Capital Group has cumulatively invested over RMB 90 million and currently holds about 2.55%, equivalent to a market value of approximately RMB 1.07 billion, with paper returns of around 10x. Shanghai Yuyi, as an employee stock ownership platform, holds 10.94% of the equity, corresponding to a market value of approximately RMB 4.59 billion; among them, 14 core employees hold approximately 5.92 million shares, with an average paper market value of nearly RMB 48.9 million per person.

In June 2025, Unitree Technologies confirmed the closing of its Series C financing round, led jointly by China Mobile’s fund, Tencent, Jinqiu, Alibaba, Ant Group, and Geely Capital, bringing its post-money valuation to RMB 12.7 billion. Calculated from its angel round valuation in 2016, the company’s valuation surged nearly 1,000-fold over nine years. Prior to its IPO, the top ten shareholders collectively held 71.50% of the company’s equity.

For early investors, a $61 billion valuation is more than enough for them to exit successfully.

For the primary market, Unitree’s listing is crucial. Currently, the valuation of several leading unlisted embodied AI companies has reached RMB 20 to 30 billion. Without Unitree’s significant rise in the secondary market serving as an “anchor,” subsequent high-valuation projects could be negatively impacted.

The CEO of a robotics company valued at over $10 billion told Tencent Technology that, just as NIO’s stock price continuously declined after its IPO, hindering XPeng’s subsequent fundraising, “although each company appears different, investors see you all as robotics companies.” They are all waiting for the first company in the industry to go public and see its stock price surge.

Several executives from humanoid robotics companies told Tencent Technology that the rush to go public is driven by two main factors: first, to facilitate fundraising through联动 between primary and secondary markets, and second, often due to pressure from investors. “It may seem these institutions haven’t reached their exit cycle yet, but once one company goes public, all others will face immense pressure from shareholders,” said the CEO of a company developing embodied AI components that is currently preparing for an IPO.

Some perspectives compare today’s embodied AI to new energy in 2021, predicting that over 80% of companies will be eliminated in the future. Concerns about future uncertainty in capital markets, combined with the slow pace of real-world implementation, have created widespread industry anxiety.

Investors are willing to pay a price-to-earnings ratio of 219.23 times for Unitree—far exceeding the industry average P/E of 38.56 times—betting on a future where humanoid robots fully replace human labor. However, Unitree’s current profits primarily come from quadruped robots. In its prospectus, Unitree acknowledged, “During the reporting period, the company has not yet scaled its proprietary general embodied large model for use in robotic products; if breakthroughs in brain technology do not materialize, the large-scale application of general-purpose robots remains uncertain.”

In other words, capital is paying for its market value based on the "brain," but Unitree can currently only earn money by selling the "little brain."

Unitree is attempting to fill this critical gap. Of the planned fundraising of RMB 6.099 billion, a portion is specifically allocated to the development of intelligent robotics models. This is an essential step in its transition from a “hardware manufacturer” to a “full-stack embodied AI platform” and is key to supporting its market valuation.

If there is consensus at the primary level, that consensus has not yet achieved sustained impact at the secondary level.

In the current A-share market environment, liquidity is relatively tight, with substantial capital being diverted to established value stocks and sectors such as semiconductors. What institutional investors in the primary market view as a highly attractive “embodied AI” opportunity may, to some secondary market investors, appear merely as a hardware company under pressure from high valuations. A representative from a public fund told Tencent Technology that this disconnect between the two perspectives is one of the sources of uncertainty facing Unitree following its listing.

On its listing day, Yushu had an extremely small free float, amplifying this emotional trading dynamic. The total number of shares offered in this public offering was 40.4464 million, but the initial allocation to online investors was only 6.471 million shares, accounting for 16% of the total offering. The remaining 84% of shares were allocated to institutional investors through strategic placements (8.0893 million shares, or 20%, locked for 12 to 24 months) and offline placements (25.8861 million shares, or 64%). Of the total post-offering share capital of 404.4643 million shares, only approximately 29.77 million shares were available for trading on the first day, representing about 7.36% of the total share capital. Over 90% of the shares were locked up on the listing day. Under such limited supply conditions, any surge in market sentiment will significantly amplify stock price volatility.

The aforementioned public figure told Tencent Tech that speculation around the Yushu chain on the secondary market has consistently exhibited typical "event-driven, spike-and-retrace" characteristics. He believes this level of attention has very limited sustainability: "Wherever it spikes, it tends to revert back, and cannot be sustained over the long term."

Taking the 2026 Spring Festival as an example, capital pre-emptively speculated on the expectation of humanoid robots appearing on the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, driving a round of hype. On February 16, Lunar New Year’s Eve, humanoid robots from companies such as Unitree Robotics made their debut on stage. The realization of this positive news quickly led to capital outflows. On February 20, the first trading day of the Year of the Horse in Hong Kong, stocks like Yujiang Robotics and UBTECH surged sharply before rapidly retracing. Just a few trading days later, on February 24, the A-share robotics concept sector suffered a sharp decline: Yuzhou Xinchun plunged over 9% intraday and closed down 6.9%, while core component manufacturers such as Green Harmonic and Wanxiang Qianchao led the sector’s losses.

Yushu Technology’s journey to the STAR Market was also highly volatile. From its acceptance on March 20 to the approval of its IPO registration on July 2, it took just 104 days—the fastest review record in STAR Market history. On July 2, the China Securities Regulatory Commission approved Yushu Technology’s IPO registration; the next day, robotics-related stocks on the A-share market surged, with over 50 stocks hitting涨停 or rising more than 10%. However, during the first three weeks of July—when Yushu’s IPO registration took effect and the World Artificial Intelligence Conference was in full swing—the CSRC Robotics Index fell 12.77% in a single week, while the STAR50 Index plunged 10.5% over three days. As expectations were fully priced in and new capital inflows dried up, a mass exit of funds from the overcrowded market triggered a sharp and severe sell-off in stock prices.

Throughout July, the total market capitalization of China's A-share market declined by over RMB 1.2 trillion. The Shanghai Composite Index fell 6.4% cumulatively, the Shenzhen Component Index dropped sharply by 16.21%, the ChiNext Index plunged 23%, and the STAR50 Index tumbled 25.90%, marking the largest monthly decline in history. AI-related stocks experienced their most devastating month, with the ChiNext and STAR50 Indexes falling 23% and 25.90% respectively, while the semiconductor index declined by over 33%.

In other words, Unitree’s valuation benchmark does not actually depend on Unitree itself.

Several analysts following the robotics sector point out that Tesla remains the only company capable of driving the entire humanoid robotics industry, drawing a parallel with the electric vehicle sector: widespread adoption of pure electric vehicles only began after the mass production of the Tesla Model 3, which shifted public perception of EVs in China and enabled the rise of other brands. Even Tesla’s ecosystem, often seen as a bellwether, faces significant uncertainty.

The release of Tesla Optimus Gen 3 is now expected to be delayed until Q1 2026, with key upgrades focused on hand dexterity and body structure. These ongoing design changes mean that the supply chain, which had been meticulously analyzed and heavily hyped by the market, could be reset at any time. “Since the launch of the first-generation Optimus, apart from total-package suppliers like Sanhua and Tuopu, the design materials, corresponding suppliers, and value contribution for each joint have changed multiple times. The design we see today may be entirely different from what will eventually be adopted when humanoid robots become widely deployed,” said an analyst.

Under this context, the aforementioned public figures believe that the key to the entire humanoid robotics sector lies in whether Tesla can unlock market expectations. “If Tesla fails to generate these expectations, and its stock price continues to decline and remain sluggish, while industry progress consistently falls short of expectations, Unitree will also find it difficult to achieve an independent upward trend.”

Nevertheless, he said, not a single person watching Yu Shu’s new listing had disappeared.