Unitree Robotics

Unitree Robotics, the Hangzhou maker of quadruped and humanoid robots that listed on Shanghai's STAR Market in August 2026, now earns more from humanoids than from robot dogs. Its filings show 73.6% of humanoid revenue in the first nine months of 2025 came from research and education buyers, the central question for a company worth about RMB61 billion at its issue price.

The joints of today's humanoid robots come from a short list of gear and actuator makers: Harmonic Drive Systems and Nabtesco in Japan, Leaderdrive, Tuopu and Sanhua in China, and Schaeffler in Germany, while Tesla, Figure and Unitree design key parts themselves. Filings show orders reaching the Japanese incumbents first, yet Tesla's stated Fremont capacity alone implies 25 million to 30 million joint actuators a year, about 22 times the 1.15 million precision reducers Nabtesco can make annually.

Skild AI's $1.4 billion Series C, led by SoftBank, and Figure AI's $1 billion Series C, led by Parkway Venture Capital, are the two largest humanoid and embodied-AI rounds in MEKAWIRE's verified records since January 2025, and together make up 41% of the $5.86 billion disclosed across 22 rounds. Humanoid makers took 70% of disclosed money in 2025, but developers of robot foundation models have taken 71% in 2026 so far, and NVIDIA joined seven rounds without leading one.

A vision-language-action (VLA) model is one neural network that reads camera images and a plain-language instruction and outputs a robot's next motor commands, built by training a vision-language model on robot demonstrations. Google DeepMind, Physical Intelligence, NVIDIA, Figure AI, Skild AI and AgiBot lead, and the commercial race now turns on the cost of action data rather than model design.

The U.S. Army has named five winners of its xTechHumanoid competition after final demonstrations at Marine Corps Base Quantico, and only one of them, IHMC's Alex, is a complete humanoid robot. The other four supply power, touch sensing and command software, a mix that shows where the Army sees the bottlenecks in military humanoids.

Zhuhai-based Amicro, which designs robot-specific chips, sensors and navigation software for cleaning and service robots, published its post-hearing information pack on the Hong Kong exchange on 30 September 2026 and is seeking a Main Board listing under Chapter 18C. Revenue rose 42.3% to RMB406.7 million in 2025 on more than 3.5 million solution sets sold, while the net loss widened to RMB155.1 million.

Shipments of professional service robots rose 24% to almost 250,000 units in 2025, led by 117,500 transport and logistics robots, the International Federation of Robotics said on 30 September 2026. The IFR counted about 7,000 full-size humanoids sold worldwide and 174 humanoid makers, more than half of them in China, and said most humanoid uses still rely on teleoperation.

Direct Drive Tech, which makes direct-drive motor modules for household and wheel-legged robots, raised HK$1,080.0 million when it listed in Hong Kong on 29 September 2026. Robot-vacuum sensor supplier Camsense followed on 30 September with HK$682.0 million after retail investors oversubscribed its public tranche 3,546.91 times. Both companies depend on five customers for more than 80% of sales, their filings show.

Global humanoid robot shipments reached nearly 25,000 units in the first half of 2026, up 432.1% year on year, with market value above $740 million, IDC said on September 29. China took about 77.9% of shipments, Chinese vendors supplied more than 95%, and IDC raised its 2030 forecast by about 50% to more than 750,000 units.

Singapore-based Sharpa launched three products at IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh: the D01 robot with whole-body electronic skin, the W02 hand with 21 active degrees of freedom at under 750 grams, and the AE01 haptic glove for teleoperation and data capture. Together they give the company the hardware to collect, replay and learn from touch-rich manipulation data.

D-Robotics, the robot-chip business Horizon Robotics stopped consolidating in March, said on 17 September 2026 it had closed a US$400 million Series C without naming a single investor or a valuation. The company says it has shipped more than 8 million Sunrise chips and that its newest S600 part won more than 20 robot customers within six months, including UBTECH, Fourier and Booster Robotics.

XPeng said on September 8, 2026 that its IRON humanoid robot has started coming off a production line with more than 80% of core processes automated, ahead of mass production at the end of 2026 and deliveries in 2027. Two weeks earlier its robotics subsidiary Dogotix agreed to raise more than US$900 million at a post-money valuation above US$6.3 billion, including US$600 million from IDG Capital, Alibaba, Tencent and Gaorong Ventures.

Churchill Capital Corp XI filed a Form S-4 with the SEC on September 4, 2026 for its $2.5 billion merger with Agility Robotics, the maker of the Digit humanoid, which plans to trade on Nasdaq as AGLT. The filing discloses 2025 net sales of $1.78 million, a net loss of $138.1 million, a $100 million SAFE raised in July 2026 and a single customer commitment of $300 million for Digit v5.

UBTech Robotics said revenue doubled to RMB1,269.1 million in the six months to June 30, 2026, driven by RMB590.3 million of full-size humanoid robot sales, up from RMB38.2 million a year earlier. The Hong Kong-listed company sold 921 Walker-class units and narrowed its loss for the period by 23.0% to RMB338.8 million, while one customer accounted for 24% of revenue.

A Tsinghua University team working with ByteDance Seed and China Agricultural University published a reinforcement learning controller in Science Robotics on August 19, 2026 that links a humanoid's camera directly to its legs. On Booster Robotics' T1, the authors report a 46% cut in ball-position error, up to 64% faster time-to-kick and about 90% kick success in frontfield positions, with no real-world fine-tuning.

Unitree Robotics began trading in Shanghai on August 19, 2026 under code 688836 after selling 40.4 million new shares at RMB150.80, raising gross proceeds of RMB6,099.32 million. The issue price values the Hangzhou humanoid and quadruped maker at about RMB60.99 billion, or 219.23 times 2025 earnings, against an industry average of 38.56 times cited in its own listing document.

Tesla said in its second-quarter 2026 update, released on July 22, that it has decommissioned the Model S and Model X lines in Fremont and is installing first-generation Optimus production lines, with production expected soon and the first robots reserved for an internal Optimus Academy that collects training data. Capital expenditure rose to $5.79 billion from $2.49 billion in the first quarter and free cash flow turned negative at minus $1.09 billion, while the update gave no robot unit count, no capacity figure and no date for Optimus Gen 3.

NVIDIA released Cosmos 3 Edge on July 20, the smallest member of its Cosmos 3 physical-AI model family, as open weights on Hugging Face. The 4-billion-parameter model runs on Jetson Thor and generates 32 robot actions per inference, and Doosan Robotics, Siemens, Agile Robots and Skild AI are evaluating it.

China's industry ministry said on July 20, 2026 that more than 230 companies have released over 400 embodied AI robot models and that full-year output of complete machines is expected to exceed 100,000 units. Official data show industrial robot output rose 28% in the first half and 29.0% to 729,352 sets in the first eight months, as Beijing pushes humanoids into real factories through a joint programme with the state asset regulator.

FlashSAC, an off-policy reinforcement learning method from a team spanning Holiday Robotics, KAIST, KRAFTON, TU Darmstadt, KTH and others, won the Outstanding Paper Award at Robotics: Science and Systems 2026 in Sydney. The authors report training a Unitree G1 walking policy in about 20 minutes on a single RTX 5090, against about three hours for the standard PPO method.

Hugging Face released version 0.6.0 of its open-source LeRobot robotics library on July 7, adding three world-model policies, five vision-language-action models including NVIDIA's GR00T N1.7, two reward models and six simulation benchmarks. NVIDIA said a day earlier that it is bringing GR00T, Isaac Teleop, Isaac Lab-Arena, Jetson Thor support and, soon, Cosmos 3 into LeRobot.

Zurich-based ANYbotics said on June 16, 2026 it had opened an office at the DFactory Barcelona Industry 4.0 campus to expand engineering in computer vision, machine learning, software, mechatronics and DevOps. The site becomes its third hub after Zurich and San Francisco, following a Yokogawa software partnership in February and the hiring of a chief revenue officer in March.

China's industry ministry and its state-asset regulator have launched a 2026 special action that requires each provincial region to open at least 20 real-world training scenes and each central state-owned enterprise at least 10. The notice, dated June 3 and published June 8, sets a year-end goal of more than 100 high-value application scenarios and the ability to deploy humanoid and embodied AI robots at a scale of tens of thousands of units.

OmniRetarget, a motion retargeting method from Amazon's Frontier AI & Robotics team and university collaborators, won both the Best Conference Paper Award and the Best Paper Award on Robot Manipulation and Locomotion at IEEE ICRA 2026 in Vienna. The method preserves contacts between body, objects and terrain, and the authors used it to generate more than 8 hours of trajectories that trained a Unitree G1 to perform parkour and box carrying in the real world without real-robot fine-tuning.

NVIDIA announced at GTC Taipei on June 1, 2026 an Isaac GR00T reference humanoid for academic research, built on Unitree's H2 Plus body with two 22-degree-of-freedom Sharpa Wave tactile hands and a Jetson AGX Thor T5000 computer. Unitree will sell it from late 2026; Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford and UC San Diego are the first named research users. No price was given.

Korea's trade ministry said on May 29 that the AI robot division of its M.AX manufacturing alliance now has about 280 members and is running industrial humanoid pilots with HD Hyundai Heavy Industries, SK Energy and BGF. It also highlighted Korean robot foundation models, a 13 km/h humanoid lower body from KAIST and plans for a 500 billion won fund with a mandatory humanoid share.

UBTech Robotics said on April 24 that it had completed the transfer of shares tendered in its partial offer for Zhejiang Fenglong Electric, taking its holding to 93,979,906 A shares, about 43.01% of the company. The Hong Kong-listed humanoid maker paid RMB17.72 a share in both steps of a deal worth up to RMB1.67 billion and later amended terms to nominate seven of eight Fenglong directors.

The 2026 Beijing E-Town humanoid half marathon on April 19 drew more than 100 robot teams from 13 provinces, against five provinces a year earlier, and about 40% of robots navigated on their own. The winning robot, Lightning of the Qitian Dasheng team, finished the 21.0975-kilometre course in 50:26 while the men's human winner ran 1:07:47, according to the Beijing municipal government.

Shanghai-based AgiBot told its 2026 partner conference on April 17 that revenue grew from RMB300,000 in 2023 to more than RMB1 billion in 2025, and that its ten-thousandth robot had rolled off the line this year. The company launched four hardware lines including the full-size Expedition A3, six models and a five-year ecosystem programme worth more than RMB2 billion.

UBTech Robotics said in its 2025 annual results that revenue from full-size humanoid robots rose 2,203.7% to RMB820.6 million on 1,079 units, lifting group revenue 53.3% to RMB2.0 billion. The net loss narrowed to RMB789.8 million, while three share placings raised RMB5.78 billion to fund capacity for more than 6,000 robots a year.

Hong Kong-listed cobot maker Dobot grew 2025 revenue 31.7% to RMB492.2 million, with embodied AI robots rising to RMB20.0 million from RMB3.9 million. Its net loss narrowed to RMB84.0 million, but the adjusted loss widened to RMB49.6 million as 39.3% of research spending went to embodied AI.

Shanghai-based AgiBot said on 30 March 2026 that its 10,000th humanoid robot had come off the production line, 112 days after it announced its 5,000th. The company said the step from 5,000 to 10,000 units ran four times faster than earlier phases, but its own December breakdown shows that only about a third of its fleet is full-size.

Hong Kong-listed RoboSense earned RMB103.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2025, its first profitable quarter, as robotics revenue more than tripled over the year to RMB709.8 million. Robot lidar shipments rose to about 303,000 units from 24,400, outpacing rival Hesai's 239,273, while revenue from car sensors fell 17.2%.

The Shanghai Stock Exchange accepted Unitree Robotics' application to list on the STAR Market on March 20, 2026, with the Hangzhou company seeking RMB4.202 billion. Its prospectus shows reviewed 2025 revenue of RMB1,708.21 million, up 335.36%, and more than 5,500 humanoids shipped in 2025, with humanoids overtaking quadrupeds as its largest product line.

Mind Robotics, the industrial AI robotics company founded and led by Rivian chief executive RJ Scaringe, said on March 11, 2026 that Accel and Andreessen Horowitz co-led a $500 million Series A, about four months after a $115 million seed. Rivian's filings show it deconsolidated the start-up in March, valued its remaining 37.6% at about $569 million using the Series A share price and recorded a $506 million gain, which by MEKAWIRE arithmetic implies an equity value near $1.51 billion.

Nanjing industrial robot maker Estun Automation began trading in Hong Kong on 9 March 2026 after pricing 96.78 million H shares at HK$15.36, raising HK$1.49 billion gross, with half of the net proceeds reserved for overseas plants, alliances and acquisitions. Its first annual results as a dual-listed company showed 2025 revenue up 21.93% and a small profit after a RMB810.93 million loss, while stabilisation buying down to HK$11.69 showed weak aftermarket demand.

Beijing humanoid robot maker Galbot announced on 2 March 2026 that it had closed a RMB 2.5 billion round, which Haidian district officials called the largest single financing in China's embodied AI sector. The state Big Fund invested in embodied AI for the first time through the National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, alongside Sinopec, CITIC and SAIC's finance arm, and the Zhongguancun Science City administration put Galbot's valuation at RMB 20 billion.

A standards committee set up under China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released the Humanoid Robot and Embodied Intelligence Standard System (2026 Edition) in Beijing on 28 February 2026. The six-part framework runs from AI "brains" and computing to joints, complete robots, applications and safety, and came with a first list of priority standard projects drafted with more than 70 leading companies.

Hyundai Motor Group agreed on February 27, 2026 to invest about 9 trillion won from 2026 in a robotics, AI and hydrogen hub at Saemangeum in North Jeolla. The plan includes a 400 billion won robot cluster with a finished-robot factory sized for about 30,000 units a year, a contract-manufacturing foundry and a parts complex, due in 2029, next to a 5.8 trillion won AI data centre scaled in phases to 50,000 GPUs.

Shenzhen-based LimX Dynamics said on 2 February 2026 it had closed a US$200 million Series B with investors including Stone Venture, JD, Oriental Fortune Capital, CoStone Capital and SAIC-backed Shangqi Capital. The round came three weeks after the launch of LimX COSA, the agentic operating system that runs its full-size humanoid Oli, and the company added a second US$200 million pre-IPO round 162 days later.

Figure AI on Jan. 27, 2026 released Helix 02, a robot foundation model that runs a humanoid from camera pixels and fingertip touch down to joint commands at 1 kHz, replacing 109,504 lines of hand-written C++ with a 10-million-parameter learned controller. The company showed a Figure 03 unloading and reloading a dishwasher across a full kitchen in a four-minute, 61-action run it says had no resets and no teleoperation.

Mobileye agreed on 5 January 2026 to buy Israeli humanoid developer Mentee Robotics for $900 million in cash and stock and closed the deal on 3 February. Its filings show chief executive Amnon Shashua, Mentee's chairman and co-founder, receives about $341 million and chief technology officer Shai Shalev-Shwartz about $118 million, with 90% of the founders' stock released only after two and four years. Mentee targets autonomous customer pilots in 2026 and series production in 2028.

NVIDIA used CES 2026 to launch the Jetson T4000, a Blackwell robot computer priced at $1,999 at 1,000-unit volume, and to release the GR00T N1.6 humanoid model and the Cosmos Reason 2 reasoning model as open models. Qualcomm answered a day earlier with its Dragonwing IQ10 robot processor and named Figure as a partner, setting up a fight for the compute socket inside humanoids.

FANUC released an open-source ROS 2 driver, made Python standard on its robots and showed NVIDIA-based physical AI demonstrations at the International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo. Yaskawa Electric and SoftBank Corp. signed a memorandum to build office robots that split AI between the mobile network edge and the robot. Organisers counted a record 673 exhibitors and 156,110 visitors over the show's four days.

UBTech Robotics agreed on 25 November 2025 to place 31.468 million new H shares at HK$98.80, raising about HK$3.11 billion, and earmarked 75% of the net proceeds for investing in or acquiring upstream and downstream companies. Eight days earlier the Shenzhen company said its Walker S2 industrial humanoid had entered mass production and delivery, with orders since the start of 2025 above RMB800 million.

Tesla shareholders approved the 2025 CEO Performance Award at the November 6, 2025 annual meeting, with 1,892,235,822 shares voting for and 564,940,908 against, according to Tesla's 8-K. The award of up to 423,743,904 restricted shares is split into 12 tranches, each earned only when a market capitalization step from $2 trillion to $8.5 trillion is paired with one of 12 operating milestones, among them the cumulative delivery of 1 million Bots, a category the award agreement defines to include Optimus.

AgiBot's acquisition vehicle Shanghai Zhiyuan Hengyue and a concert party now hold 63.6232% of Swancor Advanced Materials after holders tendered 135,663,336 shares at RMB7.78 in a partial offer that closed on 28 October 2025, Swancor disclosed on 30 October. With share transfers registered in September, the stake cost about RMB2.0 billion, and the filings say the buyer has no explicit plan to change Swancor's business within 12 months.

Unitree Robotics unveiled the H2 humanoid on 20 October 2025, a 1,820 mm, roughly 70 kg machine with 31 degrees of freedom and leg joints rated at up to 360 Nm. Its product pages now list the base model at US$29,900 before tax and shipping, or RMB 199,000 including tax, the only published price among the full-size humanoids compared here.

The first World Humanoid Robot Games closed in Beijing on 17 August 2025 after 487 matches in 26 events, contested by more than 500 robots from 280 teams in 16 countries, according to the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission. The games followed the 2025 World Robot Conference and a subsidised robot shopping festival in Beijing's E-Town district that the district says sold more than 190,000 robots and related products.

Shanghai-based Fourier on 6 August 2025 introduced GR-3, a 165 cm, 71 kg humanoid with up to 55 degrees of freedom, 31 tactile sensors and a padded exterior, which it calls its first full-size 'Care-bot'. The third model in its GRx line is aimed at public service settings, children and older adults, with rehabilitation and health monitoring named as later uses. Fourier did not disclose a price.

Unitree Robotics on 25 July 2025 launched the R1 humanoid, about 25 kg with 26 joints, from RMB 39,900 in China and US$5,900 abroad. The price is 40.3% of what the company charged for its G1 at launch and sets a public benchmark for low-cost humanoids.

Beijing embodied AI start-up Galbot completed a RMB 1.1 billion financing in June 2025 led by battery maker CATL and Puquan Capital, with China Development Bank's CDB Science and Technology Innovation, the Beijing Robotics Industry Fund and GGV Capital also investing, according to the Zhongguancun Science City administration. The deal took the company's funding over two years past RMB 2.4 billion and gave its synthetic data approach to robot learning a strategic industrial backer.

NVIDIA introduced Isaac GR00T N1.5 and the Isaac GR00T-Dreams blueprint at Computex 2025 in Taipei, saying its researchers used Cosmos-generated video to build the model's training data in 36 hours instead of nearly three months of human data collection. The 3-billion-parameter model, opened on June 11, 2025 for non-commercial use, doubled language-following accuracy on Fourier's GR-1 humanoid in NVIDIA's own tests, while AeiROBOT, Foxlink, Foxconn and NEURA Robotics signed on to parts of the stack.

Hugging Face said on 14 April 2025 that it had acquired Pollen Robotics, the French maker of the Reachy humanoid robots, its fifth acquisition. It will sell Pollen's Reachy 2 at US$70,000 as its first robot and tie the hardware to its open-source LeRobot software; the price and terms of the deal were not disclosed.

South Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy launched the K-Humanoid Alliance in Seoul on 10 April 2025, with about 40 companies, universities and other organisations signing a cooperation agreement aimed at making Korea the world's leading humanoid nation by 2030. The ministry expects more than 1 trillion won of public and private investment by 2030 and set 2028 targets for a shared robot AI foundation model and for humanoids under 60kg with more than 50 degrees of freedom.

Premier Li Qiang's 2025 Government Work Report, delivered to the National People's Congress on March 5, lists embodied AI alongside biomanufacturing, quantum technology and 6G as future industries Beijing will cultivate, and pledges a funding growth mechanism for them. The same report calls for intelligent robots as a new generation of smart terminals, a year after the 2024 report made no mention of embodied AI.