Unitree has closed the most oversubscribed IPO in Chinese stock market history. Retail investors placed 536 billion shares of orders — roughly ¥8.1 trillion (about $1.1 trillion) — from 9.78 million accounts, producing an 8,288x online oversubscription and a 0.0181% lottery rate, both A-share records. One lot (500 shares) required ¥75,400 up front. Trading on Shanghai's STAR Market under ticker 688836 is expected within the August 18–24 window, with market watchers pointing to around August 19.
The stock was priced on August 6 at ¥150.80 per share — well above the ¥104 consensus — valuing the company at ¥60.99 billion ($9 billion) at a 219.23x price-to-earnings ratio, and raising roughly ¥6.1 billion with CITIC Securities as lead underwriter.
The market is already pricing Unitree at 4x its IPO valuation
Before a single official trade, gray-market intermediaries were bidding ¥410–520 per share for IPO allotments — a 172–245% premium over the issue price. Offshore, pre-IPO perpetual contracts on Hyperliquid have traded around $92–94 per share, implying a valuation near $38 billion, roughly four times the official IPO figure.
First-day expectations are equally extreme: with no price limits for the first five STAR Market sessions (circuit breakers at +30% and +60% from the opening print), consensus estimates put a single-lot debut profit at ¥150,000–350,000 or more. The valuation climb tells the same story: ¥3.79 billion post-money at the September 2024 B+ round, ¥12 billion at the mid-2025 C round, ¥61 billion at IPO — a 16x jump in under two years.
DeepSeek's ¥141M: from API customer to co-developer
The most strategically important line in the placement ledger belongs to DeepSeek. The AI lab took 933,400 shares — about ¥141 million — with a 36-month lock-up, alongside a cooperation agreement to co-develop multimodal models for humanoid hardware. The same book includes China's National Social Security Fund, PetroChina's Kunlun Capital, China Southern Power Grid's industrial investment arm and China Telecom's Tianyi Capital (12-month lock-ups): state capital and a frontier AI lab underwriting the same thesis.
Why does equity matter more than an API contract? Two structural gaps in the traditional vendor model: first, data — robots' real-world operation data never flowed back into the model vendor's training loop; second, optimization — generic models cannot be deeply tuned to a specific machine's dynamics, sensor noise and actuator latency. Equity binding fixes the incentive structure for both. As one widely shared Chinese commentary put it, this is not 1+1=2 — it is the brain and the body growing together.
The pattern is global: OpenAI invested in Figure AI, Anthropic acquired world-model startup Decart, Google maintains DeepMind Robotics, and NVIDIA supplies effectively every humanoid player. The industry consensus forming is blunt: a software-only LLM tops out at information processing; an embodied model touches the physical world — a market an order of magnitude larger.
The fundamentals under the 219x multiple
Unitree reported 2025 revenue of ¥1.71 billion, up 335% year-on-year, with adjusted net profit of about ¥591 million (+674%), gross margin near 60% and net margin above 35% — profitable while most Western humanoid peers still burn cash. The company shipped more than 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025, placing it in the global top tier, and has sold over 33,000 quadruped robots cumulatively. Humanoids accounted for 51.5% of core revenue in 2025, up from 1.9% in 2023.
Listing-eve teaser: "Superman"
On August 17, with the listing days away, Unitree posted a teaser of a new humanoid nicknamed "Superman" (超人): a 2-meter standing jump and a top speed of 12.66 m/s on 0.85-meter legs — figures the company says exceed human world records for both. Founder Wang Xingxing appears in the video supervising the jump. The machine was reportedly developed in just over three months, with "significant room for improvement" ahead.
What to watch
- The first-day print versus the offshore signal: where the market lands between the ¥61 billion official valuation and the ~4x offshore derivative pricing.
- 688836 as the industry's pricing anchor: every future humanoid funding round and exit will now be benchmarked against Unitree's public multiples.
- Delivery on the DeepSeek partnership: the first multimodal models built jointly for Unitree hardware will be the real test of whether brain-body integration works at scale — and whether the embodied intelligence inflection point arrives sooner than expected.
Sources: e公司/证券时报, 华尔街见闻, Pomegra, MoneyCheck, 界面新闻, RobotScope
