Staff Reporter |
Editor | Liu Fangyuan
During the 2025 Spring Festival Gala, a troupe of humanoid robots dancing on stage captured the public’s imagination for the first time. For many, this was their real introduction to Unitree Robotics and its founder, Wang Xingxing.
Less than a year later, on August 19, Unitree Robotics made its debut on the STAR Market, with its share price surging on the first day. The IPO price was 150.80 yuan per share, but it closed at 845 yuan per share.
The spotlight has once again fallen on this founder born in 1990. At the time of writing, Unitree’s total market value exceeded 340 billion yuan. Based on his shareholding, Wang Xingxing’s personal stake is now worth over 100 billion yuan.
But if you rewind a few years, Wang Xingxing didn’t fit the typical mold of a founder favored by the capital markets. He didn’t have the prestige of a top-tier university, and the field of embodied AI he chose to pursue wasn’t the red-hot trend it is today.
Back in 2017, Wang Xingxing attended a gathering at the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen. Among the attendees were Lei Jun of Xiaomi and Wang Xing of Meituan. During the event, he demonstrated Unitree’s first robot dog, Laikago, to a room full of star entrepreneurs. It even froze up mid-demo. It was an awkward moment.
For a long time, Wang Xingxing seemed more like an engineer immersed in his technical world than a startup star chased by the market.
Even now, with the world’s attention on him, Wang Xingxing remains the same. At the listing ceremony on August 19, his expression was calm, showing no excitement, not even a smile—a stark contrast to the beaming faces of other entrepreneurs at their own bell-ringing events.
In a previous media interview, Wang Xingxing mentioned a viewpoint he agrees with: “When what you’re doing aligns with the main theme of the era, good resources will naturally gravitate toward you.” Now that robots have become a common language, his years of technical entrepreneurship seem to have found their answer.
A Tech Obsessive Decides to Start a Business
In Wang Xingxing’s story, some details fit the popular image of a tech founder, while others are less typical.
As a student, Wang was already a fervent robot enthusiast. In elementary school, he loved watching sci-fi documentaries. At age 10, he was ignited by the robots from Boston Dynamics on his TV screen. During middle school, he even built his own micro turbojet engine, grinding parts on a cement floor, showing a deep interest in mechanical manufacturing.
Among the founders of robot companies, Wang’s academic background isn’t top-tier. In later media coverage, his uneven academic performance became a way to emphasize his “technical prowess.” Wang was never good at English, but excelled in science. During his postgraduate entrance exams, his low English score cost him a spot at Zhejiang University; he was instead redirected to Shanghai University.
However, thanks to his early awareness of his interests and abilities, Wang knew his strengths and weaknesses well. He admitted to feeling a bit inferior before college, but later stopped caring—because in his field of expertise, he was still quite exceptional. “I knew very clearly what I was good at.” At Shanghai University, Wang began his research on quadruped robots. He refers to this turn of events as “a blessing in disguise.”
During his freshman year at Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Wang built a small bipedal robot using materials worth only about 200 yuan. During his master’s program, he started developing a small, pure electric quadruped robot.
His approach to engineering was also formed back then. For his master’s, Wang developed a quadruped robot named “XDog.” The problem was that industrial motors commonly available on the market were pricey, while Boston Dynamics’ flagship products had long relied on an expensive hydraulic system. Constrained by costs, Wang found an alternative: he chose an electric drive solution, optimizing the structure to keep the overall cost in check.
In the end, the development cost of this robot was less than 20,000 yuan. To complete the fully electric robot dog, Wang even applied to delay his graduation by six months just to finish the project.
Like many founders, Wang’s story has a decisive turning point.
After graduating, Wang joined DJI, working on motor control. But he only stayed for a little over two months. Shortly after he joined, a test video of the XDog went viral overseas, catching the attention of international scholars and investors. Soon after, the 26-year-old Wang received his first investment of 2 million yuan.
With that funding, Wang’s entrepreneurial ambitions got a crucial boost. In an interview with China Newsweek, Wang said he only firmly decided to resign and start his own company after confirming that his interest-driven innovation had gained market recognition.
At a time when the trend was still nascent, the tech obsessive Wang likely didn’t foresee the importance Unitree would hold in today’s robotics market.
Chosen by the “Era” Again
The frenzy has exceeded the imagination of this technical founder. Wang doesn’t seem to have fully adjusted to the change yet.
In July this year, Wang Xingxing graced the cover of TIME magazine, drawing yet more attention—the last Chinese entrepreneur to feature on that cover was Jack Ma, eight years ago. Regarding this wave of hype, Wang expressed his feelings in his usual “conservative” manner: “The hype is so intense that it puts considerable pressure on both the company and the entire industry. Everyone expects your technology to achieve breakthroughs at lightning speed. But the truth is, hardcore tech breakthroughs take time.”
But compared to the anxiety of Unitree’s early days, these worries feel more like “sweet troubles.”
Unitree Robotics wasn’t a company born out of a flood of easy money. Even after receiving its first investment, the early days were tough. Back then, robotics was a niche track without the industry attention it enjoys today. The market for quadruped robots was limited, the path to commercialization unclear, and startups still had to convince investors why this was worth funding.
To save money, the newly-minted founder Wang crashed on a friend’s couch for over a month.
In September 2017, Unitree released its first quadruped robot, Laikago, and started taking pre-orders. The company was getting on track, but developing robots is capital-intensive. Even with extreme cost-cutting, Unitree’s finances were stretched thin. Just when the company was on the verge of collapse, Variable Capital invested in 2018, giving Unitree the lifeline it needed to survive.
Compared to founders with flashier resumes, Wang faced a harder time raising funds. Tian Jiangchuan, managing partner of Chuxin Capital, which led Unitree’s Series A, once recalled why she initially passed on the company—she misjudged Wang based on his “humble background.” She thought that since Wang graduated from Shanghai University, and not a top-tier institution, he might lack what it takes in the robotics field.
Wang himself has said that he was a student “suppressed” by the education system, finding no sense of achievement in academics.
But investors all recognize his sharpness in technology and business. Several investors who have worked with him have told the press the same thing: Wang is deeply obsessed with technology and highly focused on products and business. He’s more comfortable talking about tech than telling stories, but he’s also business-savvy—a pragmatic founder.
When Zhang Peng, founding partner of Variable Capital, first met Wang in 2017, he felt the office didn’t look like a startup’s at all. Recalling their first meeting on a podcast, Zhang said Wang didn’t come across as a typical startup enthusiast—the rented office was like a garage, with little attention paid to branding or logos. The entire focus of the room was on products and technology.
In fact, Wang’s pragmatic streak was evident even before he started his company.
Having built things since childhood, Wang developed a habit of keeping costs low. In an interview with LatePost, Wang himself said, “I’ve always had a good sense for cost reduction, because I’ve been funding my projects with my own allowance since I was a kid.”
Even when pursuing his hobby, Wang cared about the practical value of his robots. After building his first bipedal humanoid robot in college, Wang was actually disappointed with the results, feeling they fell far short of his expectations. He found that the control technology for humanoid robots globally wasn’t great at the time, and their performance was insufficient, making it hard to see their practical value.
Once he entered the real market, these ways of thinking carried over into the company’s operations, translating into the advantages that investors and the market now see in Unitree: a “closed loop,” “low cost,” and “practical deployment.”
In a 2024 interview, Wang said Unitree had been working on commercialization early on, but when investors asked, “Are you going to make humanoid robots?” he firmly said no. His reason was simple: the product wouldn’t meet expectations.
It wasn’t until humanoid robots gained global attention—especially after the emergence of large models in late 2022, which brought a qualitative leap in AI—and customers started coming to them, that Wang’s view changed. He doesn’t shy away from admitting he follows market demand: “When there’s enough social consensus and people are willing to buy, only then will we build it.”
Now, Wang has not only gained social consensus on the value of robots, but also market consensus on Unitree’s potential.
A New Test
At last year’s World Robot Conference, Wang compared going public to the “Gaokao” (college entrance exam), calling it a milestone on a company’s path to more mature management and operations. How to fill out this exam paper handed over by the era is a challenge Wang has never faced before.
Wang has always had a quintessential engineer’s temperament. Huang Jinping, chairman of Rongyi Capital, had a clear impression of him from their first meeting: “He’s a typical tech-driven founder.” When it comes to specific technologies and products, Wang gets deeply engaged, even excited; but when the conversation shifts away from his field to more open-ended topics, he seems less comfortable.
By the eighth year of Unitree’s existence, the company had a mature line of quadruped robots, and the humanoid robot G1 was also launched that year. The pace of business activities had clearly accelerated, and funding was ramping up, but Wang’s public persona still didn’t differ much from the early-day tech enthusiast.
In an interview in August 2024, a reporter had a face-to-face conversation with Wang. Even for routine questions, he answered seriously, constantly referencing his past experiences building robots—like disliking English class and tinkering with mechanical devices. After the interview, Wang sat down alone at dinner until someone proactively approached him to ask technical questions. He’s not great at small talk, but he lights up instantly when discussing technical topics, no matter how “beginner” the question.
When it comes to technical roadmaps and the future of humanoid robots, Wang exudes an almost instinctive certainty. During one media interview, Wang continuously fielded a barrage of questions from the reporter with barely a pause. His responses came so fast that the reporter had to interrupt him multiple times to ask for clarification. He’s extremely confident in his technical judgments and highly optimistic about the future of humanoid robots.
For a tech-focused founder, this is perhaps unsurprising. In the past, the problems Wang needed to solve were mostly engineering-related.
But in the past two years, with the growth of the robotics market and the rapid expansion of Unitree’s business, Wang has had to frequently share grander visions in public and engage with people from various fields on topics beyond technology. Yet, he still feels far removed from the “hype.”
Although Unitree draws significant attention from industry, capital, government, and media, Wang’s primary focus remains the business. Huang Jinping noted that during Unitree’s growth, Wang wasn’t just responsible for strategy and management; he remained deeply involved in technical details. For certain key components, Wang would personally get involved rather than simply delegating to team members.
At a time when many startups are used to loudly promoting their products, Wang maintains a cautious demeanor. The night before releasing a major product, an investor had dinner with Wang to discuss the company’s development, but for the sake of confidentiality, Wang “didn’t mention a single word” about it.
Outside of work, Wang says he basically doesn’t play games, rarely exercises, hardly travels, and doesn’t play cards—living a relatively simple life.
Today, Wang no longer needs to explain the value of robots to the outside world. But he will face many new questions. One of them is: now that he’s at the helm of a company worth hundreds of billions of yuan, how will Wang transform from a technical expert into a true entrepreneur?
Managing a publicly listed company is an experience he’s never had. No matter how focused he is on products, he’ll need to devote more energy to marketing, branding, and organizational management. And as the robotics industry moves from exploration by a few tech companies to broader competition, will his past technical logic help the company maintain its competitive edge and find a sufficiently large commercial market?
With passion and skill, a young Wang Xingxing could build a robot that satisfied him on a limited budget. But answering these questions will be the new challenge he must now accept.
