Unitree Shares Soar 600% in Shanghai Debut, But CEO Wang Xingxing Says Humanoid Software Leap Still Years Away
Key Takeaways
- •Unitree’s Shanghai debut on the STAR Market sent its shares 600% above the IPO price on the first day of trading.
- •The company was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Hangzhou.
- •Unitree first became known for quadruped robots before expanding into humanoid models such as the H1 and G1.
- •CEO Wang Xingxing said a major software advance for humanoid robots could still be years away.
- •The listing comes amid intensifying competition in humanoid robotics in China and globally.
Chinese humanoid robot maker Unitree made a spectacular stock market debut in Shanghai, with its shares soaring 600% over the IPO price.
Despite the bumper listing, the company's founder and CEO, Wang Xingxing, cautioned that a major software breakthrough for humanoid robots could still be years away, even as optimism continues to build around embodied AI and the global robotics market.
Unitree, founded in 2016 and headquartered in Hangzhou, is one of China's most prominent robotics companies. It first built its reputation on quadruped robots, including consumer-priced models in its Go series, and later expanded into humanoid machines with its H1 and G1 models. The G1, unveiled in 2024 with a starting price of 99,000 yuan (roughly $14,000), was positioned by the company as an affordable platform for developers and researchers, well below the cost of most rival humanoids at the time. The company's humanoid robots drew broad public attention in China after performing at state broadcaster CCTV's 2025 Spring Festival Gala.
The Shanghai debut, on the STAR Market, the Shanghai Stock Exchange's tech-focused board, comes amid an intensifying global race in humanoid robotics. Tesla is developing its Optimus humanoid, US startup Figure AI has raised funding from backers including Microsoft, NVIDIA and the OpenAI Startup Fund, and Boston Dynamics continues to advance its Atlas robot. In China, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued guidelines in late 2023 calling for initial mass production of humanoid robots by 2025, and city governments including Beijing and Shanghai have since rolled out dedicated funds and targets for the sector. Long-range projections have also fueled investor interest: Morgan Stanley, in one of the most widely cited forecasts, has estimated the humanoid robot market could reach roughly $5 trillion by 2050.
The contrast between the scale of the first-day share surge and the CEO's cautious assessment highlights the gap that remains between current hardware capabilities and the software advances that executives in the field view as necessary for humanoid robots to become broadly useful. That framing is shared across the industry: Tesla CEO Elon Musk has similarly tied Optimus progress to further AI software improvements, and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has described "physical AI" — models that can understand and act in the physical world — as the field's next frontier.
Source: Economic Times Markets
