Chinese humanoid robot manufacturer Unitree is entering the stock market at a time when investor interest in the industry continues to grow rapidly. The company has finalized preparations for its upcoming IPO on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, setting the offering price at 150.8 yuan per share, implying a valuation of 61 billion yuan ($9.04 billion). The manufacturer intends to raise about $904 million, with AI model developer DeepSeek set to become one of its key investors and strategic partners.
DeepSeek will invest approximately $20.8 million in Unitree, acquiring 2.31% of the shares offered. However, the nature of the collaboration itself is far more important. The companies are effectively combining expertise in two key areas of modern robotics. Unitree is responsible for the hardware platform, while DeepSeek is expected to help address one of the industry’s biggest challenges — developing an intelligent control system capable of understanding its environment and performing complex physical tasks without predefined scenarios.
It is the software that remains the main barrier to widespread adoption of humanoid robots today. Modern machines can already walk, run, and perform simple actions, but fully autonomous operation requires training on vast amounts of data about the physical world. Partnering with Unitree will allow DeepSeek to accelerate the development of multimodal models that process text, images, and spatial information, while the robot manufacturer, in turn, will gain access to some of China’s most promising AI models.
Investor interest in such projects is driven not only by expectations of future demand but also by the gradual emergence of real world commercial use cases. One notable example was an experiment conducted by scientists at the University of California, San?Diego, in which surgeons remotely controlled humanoid Unitree G1 robots to perform gallbladder removal procedures on two live pigs.
Widespread practical use of such systems is still a long way off. During the tests, the robots required recalibration, and signal latency remains too high for surgical applications. Nevertheless, the experiment demonstrated the potential to use relatively inexpensive humanoid platforms in areas where traditional surgical systems, costing between $500,000 and several million dollars, are not economically viable. Even the Unitree G1, equipped with specialized manipulators, costs approximately $67,000, which significantly lowers the entry barrier for medical institutions.
Another factor that could strengthen Unitree’s appeal to investors is its expanding partnership with Nvidia. The companies unveiled the Isaac GR00T reference platform, which combines the humanoid robot Unitree H2 with Nvidia’s software ecosystem for AI development and training.
In effect, this is an attempt to create the equivalent of Android for humanoid robots. Startups and research centers will be able to focus on developing their own software without spending years building a hardware platform from scratch. The robot is equipped with a new Nvidia Jetson AGX Thor computing module based on the Blackwell architecture, and the Isaac ecosystem includes tools for simulation, training, remote control, and scaling the resulting applications.
For Nvidia, such cooperation extends the company’s AI ecosystem beyond data centers, adding another potential growth driver that could influence Nvidia stock performance, while for Unitree, it provides access to a global developer community and accelerates the distribution of its hardware platform. At the same time, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said that similar projects are planned with companies from the United States, Europe, and South Korea, while China’s Unitree is the first major partner for the platform.
Unitree’s listing reflects growing investor interest in companies beyond AI chip manufacturers, particularly those seeking to monetize artificial intelligence through physical devices. While the market is still in its early stages and most projects remain unprofitable, the combination of in house robot production, a strategic partnership with DeepSeek, and support from Nvidia could position Unitree as one of the leading players in the rapidly growing embodied AI segment. That is why the upcoming IPO will be an important indicator of how investors value not only computing infrastructure manufacturers but also potential leaders in the humanoid robotics market.
