Unitree opens STAR Market IPO at about $9B valuation

Hangzhou-based Unitree Robotics opened subscriptions on 10 August 2026 for its initial public offering on the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s STAR Market. China Daily, citing Xinhua, says the company is offering about 40.45 million new shares at 150.80 yuan apiece — roughly $22 — representing 10 percent of post-offer share capital, with expected gross proceeds of about 6.10 billion yuan (~$900 million) and an implied market capitalization near 61 billion yuan (~$9 billion) at the offer price.

Online and offline subscription both ran on 10 August, with successful applicants due to pay by 12 August per earlier China Daily filing coverage. The issuance announcement reported extremely strong preliminary offline demand after scrubbing invalid and top-priced bids. Interesting Engineering, citing a Shanghai Stock Exchange statement, says proceeds are earmarked mainly for intelligent robot-model R&D (~2.022 billion yuan), robot-body development (~1.11 billion), new intelligent-robot products (~445 million) and an intelligent-robot manufacturing base (~624 million). Secondary coverage also names DeepSeek among strategic investors — colour from those reports, not a diligence finding.

Unitree Robotics is the manufacturer to watch, with the G1 and Go2 as practical catalogue anchors standing in for the humanoid and quadruped lines that dominate Unitree’s public story (H1/R1 and other Go/B-series SKUs remain available on the manufacturer page). Read the piece as a capital-markets and scale story for an already-listed catalogue OEM — not a new robot launch. Prospectus figures circulating in CGTN and Interesting Engineering (for example more than 5,500 humanoids shipped in 2025 and tens of thousands of quadrupeds across 2023–2025) are company-disclosed shipment colour, not RobotVersus audits.

The official first trading day was not pinned in the 10 August subscription reports; mid-August listing talk in secondary pieces stays provisional until the exchange announces. “China’s first A-share humanoid robot stock” is press framing if the listing completes — peer filings (DEEP Robotics on STAR, Leju on ChiNext, AgiBot preparing Hong Kong) show the sector is racing for public capital, not that Unitree already trades. US market access is a live overhang: Interesting Engineering notes Unitree saying existing humanoid and quadruped models have US approvals while future models could face tighter restrictions, with the US still a meaningful revenue slice. First-quarter 2026 adjusted profit declines reported alongside rising revenue are a prospectus caution, not a catalogue score change.