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What's happening in robotics and AI — curated by the wujec.ai editors.
Unitree closed its first trading day worth 201 times last year's sales — its own filing puts growth at 36%, not 333%
On 19 August 2026 Unitree Robotics became the first humanoid robot maker to trade on a mainland Chinese exchange. It priced its offering on Shanghai's STAR Market at 150.80 yuan a share, sold 40.45 million shares — a tenth of its enlarged capital — for about 6.1 billion yuan, and entered the session valued at roughly 61 billion yuan. The market disagreed with that price immediately. The stock opened at 1,100 yuan, 629% above the offer, briefly worth about 445 billion yuan (US$66 billion). It closed at 845 yuan, still up 460%, at about 342 billion yuan. Around 23.2 billion yuan of shares changed hands in a single day, while the STAR Market Composite fell 7.2% and the Shanghai Composite 2.4%. What the buyers were paying for is set out in the prospectus. Revenue reached 1.70 billion yuan in 2025, against 392.77 million yuan the year before — a 333% jump. Net profit was 278.21 million yuan. At the closing price, the company was therefore worth roughly 201 times its annual sales and about 1,230 times its annual profit. The same filings describe a business that is already slowing. Unitree guides for first-half 2026 revenue of about 1.1 billion yuan, growth of 35.6% to 45.4% year on year — roughly a tenth of the rate that produced the debut. First-quarter profit excluding one-off items fell 52.6% as spending on research and marketing rose. 2025 was also the year the robot dog stopped being the main product. Humanoid sales of 867.8 million yuan overtook the quadrupeds, which slipped to about 42% of revenue. Unitree shipped more than 5,500 humanoids, more than any other maker in the world, on top of more than 33,000 quadrupeds sold to date. Divide the humanoid line by the units and the average machine brought in about 158,000 yuan — roughly the price of one G1 with options, not of an industrial platform. The risk the prospectus names is American. Overseas customers provided 43.65% of main-business revenue, 731.66 million yuan, and the United States alone 13.3% — in the same season that US regulators moved to bar new equipment approvals for foreign-built humanoid and quadruped robots. Unitree says the products it already sells there keep their authorisation. The sharpest number of the day was not the share price. Meituan, the food delivery company whose own delivery drones we described yesterday, held 8.7% of Unitree after the listing: close to 30 billion yuan at the closing bell, about 70 times what it originally paid. Founder Wang Xingxing, 36, held 121.4 million shares worth roughly 103 billion yuan.
Unitree G1 →Unitree's whole deployment line has no legs — all three D-series humanoids stand on a column
Unitree lists five humanoids under "Application Plan" on its own site, and three of them carry a D suffix. Not one of the three walks. G1-D, the newest, is a G1 torso on a telescopic column that travels between roughly 1,260 and 1,680 mm. Unitree counts 19 degrees of freedom outside the end effector — seven per arm, two in the waist, one in the column, two in the base — and offers the base as a choice between a passive castor stand and a powered chassis capped at 1.5 m/s. H2-D does the same thing one size up: no legs, a lifting column with 0.5 m of travel, 135 kg, 7 kg rated payload per arm. R1-D goes furthest and drops the base as well — a torso, a head and two arms bolted to a flat mounting plate, from 4,290 USD in Unitree's own shop. The reason is written into the product rather than announced. G1-D is not sold as a robot at all but as an end-to-end platform, in which the machine is one of three components; the other two are a data-acquisition console built for hundreds of robots collecting simultaneously and a training stack that exports a policy back to the machine in one click, with declared support for the open pi and GR00T families and Unitree's own UnifoLM-WMA-0. For that job legs are a liability: they add cost, they add a balance problem, and a demonstration recorded from a swaying torso is a worse training example than one recorded from a rigid column. The height range does the work that legs would otherwise do, letting the same arms reach a low bench and a high shelf. It is a quiet admission about where humanoid value sits in 2026. The walking machines — G1, H2, R1 — remain the showpieces, and Unitree has spent the summer demonstrating boxing and ping-pong with them in Beijing. The versions the company positions for actual deployment and data work are the ones that gave up the feature the whole category is named for. One caveat on availability: Unitree publishes a price for exactly one of the three, the entry R1-D configuration. G1-D and H2-D are quote-on-request, and none of the three carries a published mass or payload figure on the G1-D page. In the United States, the FCC Covered List entry of 28 July 2026 blocks new equipment authorisations for the manufacturer, which affects new models rather than machines already authorised.
Unitree G1-D →Unitree claims 12.66 m/s for a machine three months old — its own H1 was clocked at 3.3
Unitree published a preview of an unannounced bipedal robot on its official channel on 17 August, under the working name "Superman". The description carries three numbers and nothing else: a two-metre standing high jump, a top speed of 12.66 m/s, and a leg length of 0.85 m. The company states the machine "has only been in development for a little over three months, with significant room for further improvement in the coming months", and claims the results surpass the standing high jump and running speed records of all humans. Against Unitree's own line-up, the figure is startling. Our profile of the H1, the humanoid that made the company's name in 2023, records 3.3 m/s as the speed actually clocked, with the maker citing a potential above 5 m/s; the G1 sits at roughly 2 m/s. The new claim of 12.66 m/s works out to 45.6 km/h — close to four times the H1's recorded run, from a machine the company says is a quarter of a year old. What is missing matters as much as what is given. Unitree publishes no mass, no overall height, no actuator or power figures, no price, no availability, and — crucially for a record claim — no test protocol: no surface, no run-up distance, no measurement method for the jump, no indication of whether the results are repeatable or were the best of many attempts. The 0.85 m leg length is the only dimension disclosed. Nor is "Superman" confirmed as a product name; the video is labelled a preview. wujec.ai is not opening a catalogue profile for this machine yet. Our rule is that a preview is not a spec sheet — a launch video routinely mistakes an option for a standard feature, and figures shown before release tend to move. The profile will follow once Unitree publishes a data sheet with a product name behind it. Until then the numbers above are the manufacturer's own claims, reported as such.
Unitree H2 →Humanoid shipments nearly quadrupled in half a year — and every Western maker combined stayed behind China's fifth-largest
Smart Analytics Global published its half-yearly count of humanoid robot shipments on 10 August 2026, and the headline number travelled fast: 19,100 units delivered worldwide in the first six months of the year, against 5,100 in the same period of 2025 — a rise of 272 percent. The second number to travel was the change at the top. AgiBot shipped 8,400 units, a 562-percent jump, taking 44 percent of the market and pushing Unitree, on 5,900 units and 31 percent, into second place for the first time. The figure nobody quoted is the one at the other end of the table. The five vendors the report names — AgiBot, Unitree, Galbot with roughly 900 units, UBTech with about 700 and Leju with about 600 — account for some 16,500 of the 19,100 machines. Chinese vendors, the report says, contributed more than 97 percent of global shipments. That leaves everyone else on the planet, taken together, with fewer than 600 humanoids in six months: less than Leju alone, the fifth-largest producer in a single country. That comparison is worth making carefully, because the milestones Western manufacturers announce are counted differently. Figure said on 23 July that it had built its 1,000th Figure 03 — a cumulative total since production began, not a half-year figure. AgiBot's widely repeated "15,000 robots", announced in June, is cumulative too. The 8,400 and the 5,900 above are six months of deliveries, and mixing the two kinds of number is what makes the gap look smaller than it is. The forecast attached to the report sets up the test for the rest of the year. Smart Analytics Global expects global shipments to approach 60,000 units in 2026, worth roughly 1.6 billion dollars. If the first half really delivered 19,100, the second half has to deliver about 40,900 — a little over twice as much, in five months rather than six. The revenue line implies something else that rarely appears in coverage of this industry: about 27,000 dollars of market revenue per machine shipped. The humanoid business is growing on cheap units, not on the six-figure prototypes that fill the news. One structural shift in the data deserves more attention than the league table. Industrial and commercial deployments accounted for over 70 percent of first-half shipments, up from roughly 50 percent a year earlier, and China absorbed more than 85 percent of global demand. The machines are increasingly bought to work rather than to be demonstrated — and, for now, almost entirely bought at home by the companies that build them. Editorial note: these are the estimates of a private research firm, not audited figures. Manufacturers do not publish delivery numbers on a comparable basis, and the totals should be read as an order of magnitude rather than a count.
AgiBot A3 Ultra →Unitree prices its IPO at 150.8 yuan — a humanoid maker valued at 219 times earnings
Unitree Robotics (Yushu Technology) has set the price for its Shanghai STAR Market listing at 150.8 yuan per share, according to the issuance announcement filed with the Shanghai Stock Exchange under code 688836. The company is selling 40,446,434 new shares, about 10 percent of its enlarged capital, which raises roughly 6.1 billion yuan and implies a market capitalisation near 61 billion yuan — some 9 billion dollars. The pricing puts Unitree on a trailing price-to-earnings ratio of 219.23, against a sector average of 38.56 quoted in the same filing. Public subscription opens on 10 August. Entities linked to DeepSeek and Tencent are listed among the strategic investors. Unitree would be the first humanoid-robot maker listed on a mainland Chinese exchange. The company reached that point on the back of quadrupeds such as the Go2 and a humanoid line running from the H1 through the G1 to this year's H2 — products that undercut Western competitors by an order of magnitude on price. The multiple the market has accepted says less about current profits than about how much of the humanoid industry investors expect Unitree to end up owning.
Unitree H2 →Unitree starts pricing its IPO — the first humanoid maker to list on China's A-share market
Unitree Robotics began preliminary price inquiries for its STAR Market flotation on Wednesday 5 August 2026, the step that sets the issue price before subscription opens on 10 August. The offer covers about 40.45 million new shares — 10 percent of the enlarged share capital — with a target of 4.2 billion yuan (roughly 0.6 billion US dollars). China's securities regulator approved the registration on 2 July, so barely a month passed between clearance and pricing. Valuation estimates diverge sharply: investment banks put the company at about 40 billion yuan after listing, while CCB International sees 60 to 100 billion, with an optimistic case of 109 billion. The numbers underneath are what make this more than a financing story. Unitree shipped more than 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025 — first in the world by unit volume — and humanoids brought in 868 million yuan, 51.78 percent of total revenue. A company whose business was quadruped robots is now, by its own accounts, mostly a humanoid company. It will be the first embodied-intelligence firm on the A-share market. That gives the sector something it has lacked: a listed pure-play whose quarterly numbers are public, against which the shipment claims that circulate around this industry can finally be checked. wujec.ai catalogues four Unitree machines: G1, H1 Pro, H2 and the Go2 quadruped.
Unitree G1 →Unitree's three-continent rollout stalls at the US border
Unitree Robotics set out to do something no humanoid maker had done before: launch the same machine commercially on three continents inside three weeks. The H1 Pro went on sale in Europe on 22 July 2026, Asia followed on 5 August with a reported deployment of more than five hundred units into logistics warehouses and manufacturing plants, and North America was scheduled for 12 August. The American leg no longer has a route. On 28 July 2026 the FCC extended its Covered List to foreign-produced advanced robotic devices, which withholds the equipment authorisation a new hardware model needs before it can be imported, marketed or sold in the United States. Reporting indicates no current regulatory pathway for the H1 Pro there. The move follows the Pentagon adding Unitree to its list of Chinese military companies earlier in the summer, which bars Department of Defense contracts. Analysts have also pointed to China's National Intelligence Law, under which a Chinese company can be required to provide data to state intelligence services regardless of where its machines operate. No equivalent European rule blocks the sale of the H1 Pro today. The H1 Pro now has its own profile in the wujec.ai catalogue, alongside the Unitree G1, Go2 and H2.
Unitree H1 Pro →