Reported by NUPIAO News | Song Jianan
On August 19, Unitree Robotics officially debuted on the STAR Market, opening at 1,100 yuan per share — a jaw-dropping surge of 629.44% — pushing its total market value to 444.9 billion yuan.
With that explosive debut, founder Wang Xingxing’s paper net worth skyrocketed past the 100-billion-yuan mark, blowing past the roughly 18.312 billion yuan valuation of his pre-IPO stake. It’s a wealth milestone that shatters all previous records for China’s post-90s entrepreneurs. For context, the 2025 New Fortune Magazine list of post-90s business leaders had named Insta360 founder Liu Jingkang as the youngest richest person, with a net worth of 20.2 billion yuan.
As of the time of writing, Unitree’s stock has cooled off slightly from its intraday peak, trading at 892.89 yuan per share — still up an eye-watering 492.10% — with a trading volume of 15.591 billion yuan, a TTM price-to-earnings ratio of 618.15, and a total market capitalization of 361.1 billion yuan.
According to Unitree’s IPO prospectus, prior to the offering, Wang Xingxing directly held 86,714,964 shares, representing 23.8216% of total share capital. Additionally, he indirectly held another 9.5367% through the employee equity incentive platform Shanghai Yuyi, bringing his combined direct and indirect ownership to 33.3583%.
Following the IPO completion, due to share dilution, his direct stake dipped to 21.4395%, while Shanghai Yuyi’s corresponding stake now stands at 9.8472%, for a combined total of roughly 31.29%. Based on the first-day opening market cap, the market value of his holdings surpassed 130 billion yuan. It’s worth noting that the lion’s share of the Shanghai Yuyi platform’s interests is earmarked for future employee equity incentives, not Wang’s personal wealth.
What’s particularly interesting is the governance structure. Thanks to a special voting rights arrangement, Wang Xingxing controls a combined 68.7816% of voting power. Under this mechanism, he can essentially dictate ordinary resolutions at shareholder meetings and wield decisive influence over special resolutions too. This gives him outsized control over the company’s strategic direction. Post-listing, his combined voting power will settle at no more than 65.3090%.
Wang’s journey to this point wasn’t exactly a textbook path. He wasn’t your typical straight-A student, but he had an almost obsessive passion for building mechanical things. Back in high school, he was already tinkering with scrap materials to build homemade engines and model aircraft. As a college freshman, he cobbled together a simple bipedal robot from just 200 yuan worth of parts. By grad school, he’d built a low-cost, electrically-driven quadruped robot prototype for under 20,000 yuan. After a brief stint at DJI, the then-25-year-old officially founded Unitree Robotics in 2016, taking his lab prototype and turning it into a real business.
In the early days, plenty of skeptics doubted a Chinese startup could build high-performance robots. Overseas giants were throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into similar R&D, and the consensus was that domestic teams couldn’t break through. Wang’s strategy was to start with quadruped robot dogs — sellable hardware that could generate cash flow to fuel the much more capital-hungry humanoid robot research.
Once the Laikago series hit the market, its unbeatable price-to-performance ratio quickly cracked open the global scientific research market. Unitree robots soon found their way onto the春晚 (Spring Festival Gala) stage — remember the robot ox "Benben" and the humanoid robots performing yangge dances? That’s when domestic robots truly entered the mainstream public consciousness.
According to the listing prospectus, in the first half of 2026, Unitree posted revenue of 1.152 billion yuan, up 48.54% year-on-year. Net profit attributable to shareholders hit 274 million yuan, a sharp turnaround from a loss of 32.0245 million yuan in the same period last year. That swing was largely driven by non-recurring gains from last year’s hefty share-based payments. Stripping those out, adjusted net profit came in at 244 million yuan, down 19.34% year-on-year, as R&D and sales expenses climbed significantly.
In 2025, the company’s humanoid robot shipments surpassed 5,500 units, and for the first time, humanoid business revenue overtook quadruped robots to become its largest income source. That said, revenue is still heavily dependent on scientific research and educational procurement — mass adoption in industrial and household settings is still a work in progress.
Speaking about the future of robotics during the online roadshow, Wang said that driven by multiple demands — an aging population, rising labor costs, and the push for higher productivity and quality of life — high-performance general-purpose robots that can assist humans with various tasks represent a critical breakthrough for solving labor shortages and efficiency bottlenecks. The market potential, he argued, is immense.
He also emphasized that Unitree will keep pushing forward on embodied AI large models, scenario data collection and analysis, reinforcement learning, embodied hardware models, in-house core components, and high-performance actuators. The company is actively exploring more product forms and models — humanoids, quadrupeds, mechs, and beyond — with the goal of taking over high-intensity, high-risk physical labor, freeing up human creativity, and making sure robot technology truly benefits society.
