Unitree, a robot company, most investors have never heard of went public – and it could change how you think about the next decade

Recently, shares in a company called Unitree started trading in Shanghai. You’ve probably never heard of it. But there’s a decent chance you’ve seen its robots without knowing it. The ones doing backflips, running like sprinters, even throwing kung fu kicks in viral videos that rack up millions of views.

Robotics isn’t a novelty act anymore. It’s about to become a real, tradeable, $9 billion company. And retail investors in China wanted in so badly that the IPO was oversubscribed more than 8,000 times over.

Let that sink in for a second. Not 8 times. Not 80 times. Eight thousand.

I think what’s happening with Unitree is a signal – one worth paying attention to even if you’ll never own a single Unitree share.

From party trick to public company for Unitree

For the last few years, artificial intelligence has lived almost entirely behind a screen. It writes, it chats, it analyses, it generates images. Clever stuff but disembodied.

What’s happening now is that intelligence is climbing out of the screen and into a body.

Unitree builds that body. Cheap ones too. Some of its robots sell for under $5,000, others for over $150,000, spanning factories, universities and eventually, homes. And unlike most exciting new tech companies you hear about, it’s not burning cash to chase a dream. It’s already profitable, with revenue that’s more than quadrupled in a year.

That combination (real revenue, real profit, real product) is rare in a sector this early. It’s part of why Chinese retail investors nearly broke the order book trying to get in.

There’s also a name in the IPO paperwork that caught my eye: DeepSeek, the Chinese AI company that rattled global tech markets last year, took a strategic stake with a three-year lockup.

In other words, the company behind one of the sharpest AI models on the planet just bet its own capital that Unitree’s robots are worth building a long-term partnership around, not just admiring on video.

A robots race nobody is hiding anymore

China isn’t quietly building an advantage in humanoid robots. It’s out in the open about it. In fact, the country now accounts for roughly 85% of global humanoid robot shipments. Meanwhile, Tesla is pouring real manufacturing capacity into its own humanoid, Optimus, at its Texas gigafactory. Nvidia is racing to supply the “brains” for robots built by companies like Unitree. And a growing list of US and Chinese challengers – Figure AI, Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics, UBTech – are all fighting for position in a market that barely existed five years ago.

Governments have noticed too. Late last month, US regulators moved to block new Chinese-made humanoid and four-legged robots from entering American markets, citing national security concerns. It’s the same playbook Washington used against Chinese solar panels, batteries and EVs. Beijing has threatened to hit back.

Think about what that tells you. This is an industry whose biggest commercial use cases haven’t even been invented yet, and the world’s two largest economies are already treating it like a resource worth fighting over.

Why I’m not telling you to buy Unitree

I’m not. Most of you can’t anyway. It’s listing on Shanghai’s STAR board, largely off-limits to ordinary foreign investors, and pre-listing chatter on crypto trading platforms has already priced parts of the stock at four times its IPO valuation.

But that’s exactly why this moment matters more than the stock itself.

I’ve watched this pattern before – with the internet, with semiconductors, with AI. Something looks like a curiosity for years. Then, almost overnight, the infrastructure, the capital and the public listings show up all at once, and suddenly you realise the window to “wait and see” has already started closing.

Dedicated robotics ETFs are launching. Tesla is building factories for robots, not just cars. Nvidia is designing chips specifically to power them.

And today, for the first time, ordinary investors get to put a real market price on a humanoid robot company with actual customers and actual profit.

Nobody knows yet whether Unitree, Tesla, Figure or some company you’ve never heard of will end up dominating this space. I certainly don’t.

What I do know is robots are leaving the lab and entering factories. Capital is following them. And by the time this becomes an obvious story everyone’s talking about, the easiest money will already have been made by people who started paying attention now.