Dancing robot company pops 460% in Shanghai IPO

  

Dancing robot company pops 460% in Shanghai IPO

Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

To put it in terms familiar to anyone who’s seen clips of these humanoids, shares of China’s Unitree Robotics did more than a quadruple backflip yesterday in its stock market debut.

It’s a blowout showing from a company whose bots have attracted viral attention over the past year (see: Unitree robots doing synchronized kung fu, surviving martial-arts kicks, and mouthing off as the TikTok star Rizzbot):

• Shares of Unitree surged nearly 630% in China, before closing up 460%.
• The company raised $900 million in its debut. Strategic investors included Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, a group associated with tech giant Tencent, and several state-owned utility companies.
• The IPO valued Unitree at ~$9 billion. That’s more than 200x its earnings last year.

This is the first humanoid company to go public in mainland China, and demand was overwhelming. Retail traders were 5,000x oversubscribed, as China’s world-leading humanoid market is predicted to balloon from $2 billion this year to $15 billion by 2030, per Morgan Stanley.

Zoom out: Unitree is the second major Chinese company in a month to list its shares in Shanghai rather than the US, underscoring China’s efforts to keep its tech players domestic and away from Silicon Valley.