Author: Tanay Jaipuria, Wing Partner
Compiled by: Felix, PANews
Editor’s Note: On May 25, the Shanghai Stock Exchange website showed that Unitree Robotics’ IPO on the STAR Market will be reviewed on June 1, with plans to raise $620 million in an attempt to become the first humanoid robot company listed on China’s A-share market.
The prospectus of Unitree Robotics has attracted significant attention because it accurately reflects the current state of the robotics market.
As the company with the highest global shipment volume of humanoid robots, Unitree has not only achieved profitability but also maintained rapid growth. This article will explore:
Unitree Robotics products
Shift in revenue structure toward humanoid robots
Which companies are currently buying robots (and why)?
Vertically integrated business model
Financial Analysis
Model layer development goals
Unitree Robotics products
Unitree Robotics was founded in Hangzhou in 2016 by founder Wang Xingxing, a self-taught robotics expert known for building the first quadruped robot in his apartment. The company currently has 480 employees, approximately 175 of whom are in R&D.
The company primarily sells two main products:
Quadruped robots (robot dogs): Go2 (consumer and research grade), B2 (industrial grade), and A2.
Humanoid robots: H1, H2, G1, and R1. You may have seen G1 in popular online videos; it stands 1.32 meters tall and weighs 35 kilograms.
The company has been conducting international business since 2018. Over 35% of its revenue comes from outside China, including a large client base from the U.S. academic community.
Transition to humanoid robots
Two years ago, Unitree Technology was essentially a robot dog company, primarily selling quadruped robots. In 2023, humanoid robots accounted for only 1.9% of its revenue.
However, by the first three quarters of 2025, humanoid robots accounted for more than half of its revenue.
The shift is driven by product-market fit and aggressive marketing strategies. The company's humanoid robots have appeared on the CCTV Spring Festival Gala for two consecutive years. In 2024, Jensen Huang also showcased a Unitree robot at the GTC conference.
Unitree robots appear on the CCTV Spring Festival Gala
This level of brand exposure has successfully translated into commercial and research demand, something most Chinese hardware companies have never truly achieved.
Unitree's humanoid robot shipment volume is particularly remarkable compared to other companies. In 2025, Unitree sold approximately 5,500 humanoid robots, becoming the world’s top-selling manufacturer of bipedal humanoid robots. In China, Agibot follows closely behind. In contrast, well-known U.S. companies such as Figure AI and Agility Robotics may have sold only a few hundred units (or even fewer).
The five-year target in the prospectus is to achieve an annual production of 75,000 humanoid robots and 115,000 quadruped robots—approximately 14 times the 2025 output of humanoid robots. This goal is ambitious, but it also highlights that the industry is still in its very early stages.
Who is buying bots?
The prospectus categorizes buyers into three groups: scientific research and education, commercial and consumer, and industrial applications.
The harsh reality is that, for now, demand for humanoid robots is primarily concentrated in research and educational settings.
1. Research and Education: Accounts for 74% of humanoid robot revenue/sales. Since 2022, academic buyers have been Unitree’s primary customer segment and remain the company’s largest source of total revenue.
2. Commercial and Consumer: Accounts for 17% of humanoid robot sales. Non-academic consumers who purchase these robots mostly use them for “display”: serving as eye-catching promoters in retail locations, tourist attractions, performances, and exhibitions. In the first nine months of 2025, consumer-grade revenue nearly quadrupled year-over-year, which sounds impressive, but the initial baseline was extremely small. Today, the most realistic application for a humanoid robot priced at $25,000 appears to be standing outside a store in Shenzhen to attract customers.
3. Industrial applications: Account for only 9% of humanoid robot sales. Unitree also acknowledges that industrial deployment is relatively limited due to immature technology, reflecting the current state of the industry. Of this 9% in sales, approximately 50%-70% are used in scenarios such as corporate reception and guiding; therefore, the total shipment volume of humanoid robots actually used for real-world tasks like corporate reception and inspection amounts to only 3%-4%.
The prospects for quadruped robots (robot dogs) are even clearer: only about one-third of sales come from research, over 40% from commercial applications, and the rest from industrial uses. In this field, production scenarios have become more mature. Its customers include State Grid, Southern Power Grid, China National Petroleum Corporation, Sinopec, Baowu Group, and JD.com (JD.com is Unitree’s largest customer). These companies use quadruped robots for actual daily inspections of chemical plants, substations, coal mines, pipelines, and more.
Unitree quadruped robots are used for inspection tasks.
Vertically integrated business model
One of Unitree's unique advantages is its ability to independently design and manufacture most core components: high-torque motors, precision gearboxes, encoders, joint modules, intelligent controllers, high-precision sensors, dexterous hands, LiDAR, and cameras. According to McKinsey data, actuators—motors, gearboxes, and joint systems that drive robot movement—typically account for 40%-60% of the total bill of materials (BOM) cost for humanoid robots.
Most companies in this field rely on external sourcing, but Unitree manufactures its own components. External parts account for only about 14%-18% of its total costs. It outsources only generic components such as battery cells and flash memory, as well as differentiated components like the core computing board.
As a result, the manufacturing cost per quadruped robot has decreased from approximately $3,300 in 2022 to about $1,800 by mid-2025, a reduction of 46%. During the same period, the cost of humanoid robots also fell from approximately $10,800 to $9,200.
Interestingly, as shown below, despite the average selling price of quadruped and humanoid robots declining year over year, their gross profit margins have increased throughout the period due to their highly vertically integrated strategy: rising from around 45% in 2022–2023 to nearly 60% in 2025.
Note: Unitree sold only five humanoid robots in 2023, so the average selling price for that year is not representative.
Financial Overview
Driven by strong growth in its humanoid robotics business, the company's revenue surged from $58 million in 2024 to approximately $252 million in 2025, a remarkable increase of 335%. For most of the company's history, international sales have accounted for more than 55% of revenue. In 2025, domestic revenue in China exceeded export revenue for the first time, although the absolute value of overseas export revenue still doubled year-over-year.
Gross profit margin is close to 60% and has been steadily increasing in recent years, as detailed below.
Looking horizontally: most hardware companies have gross margins between 30% and 40%, while software companies typically achieve 70% to 80%. For a company selling physical robots, Unitree’s gross margin is exceptionally high, entirely due to its vertical integration model and the strong differentiation of its current products.
The company achieved profitability in 2024 (under U.S. GAAP), with a margin of approximately 18%, and nearly 35% on an adjusted basis.
Unitree Robotics aims for a valuation of approximately $6 billion to $7 billion in this IPO.
Model Layer Vision
Unitree plans to allocate nearly half of its IPO proceeds to software development. Of the $620 million raised, approximately $300 million is designated for AI model training over the next three years, equivalent to about $100 million annually invested in developing "embodied large models."
The prospectus describes two parallel model architectures:
The first is the VLA (Vision-Language-Action) model: this model directly maps visual and language inputs into motion commands, enabling robots to generalize and handle unfamiliar tasks without manually programmed instructions.
The second is the WMA (World Model + Action) model: Unitree considers this a more reliable approach. The WMA model can construct an internal simulation of physical reality, allowing the robot to predict what will happen before acting, rather than learning purely through trial and error.
Unitree has released the initial versions of these two models. In September 2025, Unitree open-sourced UnifoLM-WMA-0; in January 2026, it open-sourced UnifoLM-VLA-0.
Unitree also provided a detailed breakdown of the model’s approximate expenses, as shown below:
Unitree Technology’s current lead in hardware is undeniable, but the company understands that to maintain a lasting moat in robotics, it may need to also control the model layer—the “brain” system that determines what the robot does and how it moves. Additionally, its ambitions in software serve as a hedge against hardware commoditization (price competition). Unitree has built a moat in hardware manufacturing.
However, if actuators and joint modules eventually become standardized components, like batteries in electric vehicles, the industry's defenses and competitive barriers will inevitably shift to the model layer.
Conclusion
Unitree Technologies has a profitable hardware business, a strong manufacturing moat, and more humanoid robots than any other company, at highly competitive prices. However, as reflected by the actual use cases of humanoid robots, widespread commercialization is still in its early stages. “Demonstration” applications dominate consumer demand, while industrial deployments remain relatively limited.
Unitree Robotics offers a glimpse into the current state of the robotics market, and further breakthroughs in models, hardware, and application scenarios are expected in the future.
Read more: A look at over 30 humanoid robotics companies: Who will emerge victorious by 2026?