Everyone in Robotics Is Burning Cash. Unitree Turned a Profit in China.
Late 2017. The World Internet Conference is underway in Wuzhen， a canal town in Zhejiang province. Wang Xingxing-founder of a small Hangzhou robotics outfit called Unitree-doesn't have a badge to get in. So he sets up outside the doors and demos his company's first product： an early Laikago， a quadruped robot named for the Soviet space dog that flew on Sputnik 2.
His audience： Lei Jun， CEO of Xiaomi， and Wang Xing， CEO of Meituan. Two of the most powerful tech founders in China.
Then the robot crashed. Wang had to reboot it right there on the doorstep. By all accounts， it was a deeply awkward few minutes.
He was convinced it would work anyway. Nine years later-on the day I was finishing this piece-Unitree's IPO cleared the Shanghai Stock Exchange's listing committee， targeting a raise of about 4.2 billion yuan， roughly $610 million. It's set to become the first dedicated humanoid robotics company to list on China's A-share market.
Around the same time， Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced that the company's Isaac GR00T reference design would integrate Unitree's H2 Plus humanoid， paired with Nvidia's Jetson Thor and the GR00T workflow. The H2 Plus is expected to ship by year's end.
If you've read about Unitree in the English-language press， you've probably gotten the broad-strokes version. How did the company actually go global？ What is Wang Xingxing like？ And how， in an industry where everyone is hemorrhaging cash， did Unitree start making money？
I've been lucky enough to interview Wang in person more than once. What follows draws on his IPO prospectus， the company's reply letter to the exchange， and several off-the-record conversations-an attempt at some real answers.
A $5，600 Robot With a 40% Margin
For the rest of the robotics industry， Unitree's prospectus is a problem.
Everyone in Robotics Is Burning Cash. Unitree Turned a Profit in China.
Late 2017. The World Internet Conference is underway in Wuzhen， a canal town in Zhejiang province. Wang Xingxing-founder of a small Hangzhou robotics outfit called Unitree-doesn't have a badge to get in. So he sets up outside the doors and demos his company's first product： an early Laikago， a quadruped robot named for the Soviet space dog that flew on Sputnik 2.
His audience： Lei Jun， CEO of Xiaomi， and Wang Xing， CEO of Meituan. Two of the most powerful tech founders in China.
The field has made enormous technical strides in the last few years， but most companies run on venture money. Losing money is the baseline. Unitree posted a net profit of 77.5 million yuan （about $11 million） in 2024， and by 2025 that had climbed to roughly 600 million yuan （$84 million）-a net margin around 35 percent.
That isn't supposed to be possible right now. Humanoids still aren't shipping in real volume. Most makers count it a win just to keep build quality consistent. Training data is scarce， so the robots can't do much that's useful in the real world. And security is an afterthought-even basic backdoor protection is spotty.
Wang isn't chasing any of those frontiers. Spend time with him and you realize he's fixated on one question： how do you ship a product that works， at a cost you can actually control？ His robots may not be the most advanced on the market. But they're reliable enough-and once you factor in the price， "reliable enough" starts to look like a steal.
He's been obsessed with cost since long before Unitree existed. As a student， he tried to build a bipedal robot for 200 yuan-about 28 bucks. He tinkered constantly； one experiment， electrolyzing tap water， accidentally released chlorine gas.
In 2015， finishing his master's at Shanghai University， he built a quadruped called XDog out of hobby-grade motors meant for model airplanes. All in， it cost under 20，000 yuan-about $2，800. Boston Dynamics' Spot， for comparison， rented for more than $70，000.
Where Boston Dynamics used hydraulic joints， Wang went electric-and not with industrial motors， but cheap brushless ones. His robot dogs used as few parts as he could get away with. He's said he started the company with just 2 million yuan-around $280，000-and every yuan had to pull its weight.
That same discipline shows up in the humanoids. This March， the Chinese brokerage China Post Securities took apart a base-model G1 （after-tax price： 85，000 yuan， about $12，000） to estimate what it cost to build.
The motors， driver boards， and gearboxes-a humanoid's most critical components-came out with no manufacturer logos at all， which usually means one of two things： Unitree makes them itself， or the supplier is staying very quiet. The memory and storage came from Biwin and Longsys， both Chinese. The main processor was a Rockchip RK3588 （there's also a Qualcomm-based version， the G1Q）. The default lidar came from DJI， with RoboSense or Hesai as options.
Mixing in-house parts with cheap commodity components， the teardown pegged the base G1's bill of materials at around 40，000 yuan （roughly $5，600）-a gross margin north of 40 percent. Upgrade the unit， and that margin sails past 60. This is the engine behind Unitree's climbing margins： most humanoid buyers are universities and labs， and they tend to splurge on the pricier， modifiable EDU version. The more they buy， the better the math gets.
Back in 2024， I interviewed a Unitree salesperson at a trade show. He told me， flatly， that the humanoid business could realistically clear a billion yuan-about $140 million-a year. He wasn't wrong-2025 revenue came in around 1.71 billion yuan， roughly $240 million. （He later blocked me. Unitree， I gather， keeps its people on a short leash when it comes to reporters.）
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So Why Did the Money Show Up All at Once？
The real puzzle in the prospectus isn't the early losses. It's how fast the profits arrived in 2025. Humanoid revenue jumped from 107 million yuan （about $15 million） in 2024 to 869 million （$122 million） in 2025-outearning， for the first time， the robot dogs that built the company.
The Western press tends to credit one moment： the dancing robots on China's CCTV Spring Festival Gala in early 2025， which kicked off a national humanoid craze. That's not wrong， but it's not the whole story. Having covered this beat from 2023 to 2025， I can tell you the fascination was building in China well before that broadcast.
Unitree's early H1， back when it could only shuffle， was already pulling millions of views on Douyin. Once a later H1 could fold itself up and walk like a person， Chinese social media lost it. Every product teaser Unitree dropped， ordinary users would re-cut into clips that racked up millions of views overnight-I was one of them， for a while. Other startups noticed and tried to copy the formula. None of it landed the way Unitree's did.
At the 2025 World Robot Conference in Beijing， I asked Wang whether he'd set out to build humanoids on purpose. His answer caught me off guard：
"For a long time I was actually against making humanoids. I'd built a bipedal one back in 2009， and the business case was brutal. But by 2022， customers were placing orders-some were paying deposits before we even had a product. So we built one."
That's it. No vision， no AGI， no sweeping story about automation. Customers wanted one， so he made one. The humanoid frenzy has， in a strange way， almost nothing to do with him-he's watching it from the sidelines. My honest guess is that the 2025 revenue spike is just the 2023 and 2024 orders finally being fulfilled.
This is what separates Wang from most humanoid founders： he's more conservative. Zhang Peng， founder of the tech-media brand GeekPark and an early Unitree backer， has described him as the rare founder who'll tell you plainly which problems are hard and how long each will really take. Worth remembering： when Wang was saying these things， he'd just left a three-month stint at DJI.
Because he never learned to sell a vision， his path to profit was almost comically simple： build the thing， and the labs will buy it. So labs and universities became his market. Unitree's gear performed roughly on par with Boston Dynamics' at about 30 percent of the cost， sometimes less. The electric drivetrain was easy to hack on-grad students could tinker， publish papers， and spread the word at conferences. Marketing， in the usual sense， was a line item he could mostly skip.
The Unitree social accounts everyone knows now？ They didn't roll out until 2021. The in-house video team didn't exist until 2022. Wang barely posts. The prospectus puts Unitree's 2025 ad spend at 60.53 million yuan-about $8.5 million - not much， for a brand this recognizable.
Then the robot crashed. Wang had to reboot it right there on the doorstep. By all accounts， it was a deeply awkward few minutes.
He was convinced it would work anyway. Nine years later-on the day I was finishing this piece-Unitree's IPO cleared the Shanghai Stock Exchange's listing committee， targeting a raise of about 4.2 billion yuan， roughly $610 million. It's set to become the first dedicated humanoid robotics company to list on China's A-share market.
Around the same time， Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced that the company's Isaac GR00T reference design would integrate Unitree's H2 Plus humanoid， paired with Nvidia's Jetson Thor and the GR00T workflow. The H2 Plus is expected to ship by year's end.
If you've read about Unitree in the English-language press， you've probably gotten the broad-strokes version. How did the company actually go global？ What is Wang Xingxing like？ And how， in an industry where everyone is hemorrhaging cash， did Unitree start making money？
I've been lucky enough to interview Wang in person more than once. What follows draws on his IPO prospectus， the company's reply letter to the exchange， and several off-the-record conversations-an attempt at some real answers.
A $5，600 Robot With a 40% Margin
For the rest of the robotics industry， Unitree's prospectus is a problem.
The field has made enormous technical strides in the last few years， but most companies run on venture money. Losing money is the baseline. Unitree posted a net profit of 77.5 million yuan （about $11 million） in 2024， and by 2025 that had climbed to roughly 600 million yuan （$84 million）-a net margin around 35 percent.
That isn't supposed to be possible right now. Humanoids still aren't shipping in real volume. Most makers count it a win just to keep build quality consistent. Training data is scarce， so the robots can't do much that's useful in the real world. And security is an afterthought-even basic backdoor protection is spotty.
Wang isn't chasing any of those frontiers. Spend time with him and you realize he's fixated on one question： how do you ship a product that works， at a cost you can actually control？ His robots may not be the most advanced on the market. But they're reliable enough-and once you factor in the price， "reliable enough" starts to look like a steal.
He's been obsessed with cost since long before Unitree existed. As a student， he tried to build a bipedal robot for 200 yuan-about 28 bucks. He tinkered constantly； one experiment， electrolyzing tap water， accidentally released chlorine gas.
In 2015， finishing his master's at Shanghai University， he built a quadruped called XDog out of hobby-grade motors meant for model airplanes. All in， it cost under 20，000 yuan-about $2，800. Boston Dynamics' Spot， for comparison， rented for more than $70，000.
Where Boston Dynamics used hydraulic joints， Wang went electric-and not with industrial motors， but cheap brushless ones. His robot dogs used as few parts as he could get away with. He's said he started the company with just 2 million yuan-around $280，000-and every yuan had to pull its weight.
That same discipline shows up in the humanoids. This March， the Chinese brokerage China Post Securities took apart a base-model G1 （after-tax price： 85，000 yuan， about $12，000） to estimate what it cost to build.
The motors， driver boards， and gearboxes-a humanoid's most critical components-came out with no manufacturer logos at all， which usually means one of two things： Unitree makes them itself， or the supplier is staying very quiet. The memory and storage came from Biwin and Longsys， both Chinese. The main processor was a Rockchip RK3588 （there's also a Qualcomm-based version， the G1Q）. The default lidar came from DJI， with RoboSense or Hesai as options.
Mixing in-house parts with cheap commodity components， the teardown pegged the base G1's bill of materials at around 40，000 yuan （roughly $5，600）-a gross margin north of 40 percent. Upgrade the unit， and that margin sails past 60. This is the engine behind Unitree's climbing margins： most humanoid buyers are universities and labs， and they tend to splurge on the pricier， modifiable EDU version. The more they buy， the better the math gets.
Back in 2024， I interviewed a Unitree salesperson at a trade show. He told me， flatly， that the humanoid business could realistically clear a billion yuan-about $140 million-a year. He wasn't wrong-2025 revenue came in around 1.71 billion yuan， roughly $240 million. （He later blocked me. Unitree， I gather， keeps its people on a short leash when it comes to reporters.）
Please like and follow if you enjoyed our work！
So Why Did the Money Show Up All at Once？
The real puzzle in the prospectus isn't the early losses. It's how fast the profits arrived in 2025. Humanoid revenue jumped from 107 million yuan （about $15 million） in 2024 to 869 million （$122 million） in 2025-outearning， for the first time， the robot dogs that built the company.
The Western press tends to credit one moment： the dancing robots on China's CCTV Spring Festival Gala in early 2025， which kicked off a national humanoid craze. That's not wrong， but it's not the whole story. Having covered this beat from 2023 to 2025， I can tell you the fascination was building in China well before that broadcast.
Unitree's early H1， back when it could only shuffle， was already pulling millions of views on Douyin. Once a later H1 could fold itself up and walk like a person， Chinese social media lost it. Every product teaser Unitree dropped， ordinary users would re-cut into clips that racked up millions of views overnight-I was one of them， for a while. Other startups noticed and tried to copy the formula. None of it landed the way Unitree's did.
At the 2025 World Robot Conference in Beijing， I asked Wang whether he'd set out to build humanoids on purpose. His answer caught me off guard：
"For a long time I was actually against making humanoids. I'd built a bipedal one back in 2009， and the business case was brutal. But by 2022， customers were placing orders-some were paying deposits before we even had a product. So we built one."
That's it. No vision， no AGI， no sweeping story about automation. Customers wanted one， so he made one. The humanoid frenzy has， in a strange way， almost nothing to do with him-he's watching it from the sidelines. My honest guess is that the 2025 revenue spike is just the 2023 and 2024 orders finally being fulfilled.
This is what separates Wang from most humanoid founders： he's more conservative. Zhang Peng， founder of the tech-media brand GeekPark and an early Unitree backer， has described him as the rare founder who'll tell you plainly which problems are hard and how long each will really take. Worth remembering： when Wang was saying these things， he'd just left a three-month stint at DJI.
Because he never learned to sell a vision， his path to profit was almost comically simple： build the thing， and the labs will buy it. So labs and universities became his market. Unitree's gear performed roughly on par with Boston Dynamics' at about 30 percent of the cost， sometimes less. The electric drivetrain was easy to hack on-grad students could tinker， publish papers， and spread the word at conferences. Marketing， in the usual sense， was a line item he could mostly skip.
The Unitree social accounts everyone knows now？ They didn't roll out until 2021. The in-house video team didn't exist until 2022. Wang barely posts. The prospectus puts Unitree's 2025 ad spend at 60.53 million yuan-about $8.5 million - not much， for a brand this recognizable.
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