Analysis
Unitree Robotics set book-building for August 5 and public subscription for August 10 on its Shanghai STAR Market IPO, targeting a base valuation near $6.2 billion -- but secondary-market expectations are already anchored well above $14.8 billion once shares actually begin trading, a gap that reflects how much investor appetite has built for a rare profitable name in humanoid robotics. Unitree shipped roughly 5,500 humanoid units in 2025, more than any other manufacturer worldwide, on $235 million of revenue and 60% gross margins.
That real, transparent valuation range is about to sit next to a very different kind of number: Figure, a leading US humanoid-robotics company, carries a reported $39 billion private valuation built entirely on private funding rounds, with no public trading history to test it against. Even at the high end of Unitree's secondary-market chatter, the gap between a market-tested $14.8 billion and an opaque, faith-based $39 billion private mark is enormous -- more than double, for a company that actually ships more units and generates real revenue.
“Private markets have had the luxury of pricing humanoid robotics on narrative and roadmap; public markets will price Unitree on quarterly numbers.”
The comparison isn't perfectly clean -- Figure and Unitree pursue different product strategies, customer bases and geographies -- but Unitree's IPO is nonetheless about to become the first genuinely market-tested data point anywhere in humanoid robotics, and every other private humanoid-robotics valuation, Figure's included, will inevitably get measured against it once real trading begins. Private markets have had the luxury of pricing humanoid robotics on narrative and roadmap; public markets will price Unitree on quarterly numbers.
For robotics-focused investors and LPs with private exposure to companies like Figure, Unitree's IPO outcome is worth watching less as a single data point about one company and more as a referendum on how much of the sector's private valuation enthusiasm survives an actual public price discovery process. What to watch: where Unitree actually prices relative to both its $6.2 billion base and the much higher secondary-market chatter, and whether Figure or other private humanoid names face any valuation pressure once a real public comparable finally exists.
