Unitree priced its Shanghai STAR Market listing at RMB150.80 a share on 7 August, issuing 40.45 million new shares for a RMB60.99bn valuation — about $9bn. It raised RMB6.1bn, above an initial target of RMB4.2bn.
The DeepSeek line
Hangzhou DeepSeek AI Basic Technology Research was allocated 933,900 shares worth RMB141m, with a 36-month lockup. Against the valuation that is roughly 0.23% — a strategic placement in the IPO book, not a venture round and not a control stake. The lockup is the signal, not the size.
Who else is on the list
Other strategic investors include Tencent Holdings, China National Petroleum, China Southern Power Grid, China Telecom, Citic Securities and the National Council for Social Security Fund. Unitree says strategics were selected partly for potential cooperation in large models, embodied intelligence and robotics development — which is to say the list reads as a customer roster and a policy signal as much as a shareholder register. Two state energy utilities and a state telecom carrier are not passive capital.
What the memorandum covers
Founder Wang Xingxing named three areas under a signed strategic memorandum with DeepSeek: joint R&D toward AGI, high-performance general-purpose robots, and AI large models. He also disclosed that Unitree's 2025 humanoid shipments exceeded 5,500 units, excluding wheeled dual-arm models.
One number to hold loosely
The $9bn is the IPO pricing valuation, not a post-listing market capitalisation — on the STAR Market those diverge sharply in the first trading days. What is fixed is the structure: China's most visible robotics manufacturer now has its most visible AI lab on the register, contractually, for three years.