Unitree, a Chinese robotics manufacturer backed by DeepSeek, Tencent and state-owned investors, raised approximately $904 million in its initial public offering on Shanghai's STAR Market, valuing the company at roughly $9.04 billion. Retail investors submitted orders for 8,288.82 times the available shares, producing a winning rate of 0.018 percent for lottery applicants.
The oversubscription ratio ranks among the highest recorded for mainland Chinese IPOs in recent years. A comparable reference: in 2024, the median retail oversubscription for STAR Market listings stood near 500 times. Unitree's 8,288-times demand placed it well above that median. Unitree designs quadruped robots and humanoid platforms sold to industrial, research and commercial customers.
The company counts DeepSeek, the AI inference startup that released its reasoning model in late 2024, as a strategic investor. Tencent, China's largest internet company by market value, also backed the round. State-owned enterprises participated in earlier funding stages, according to pre-IPO filings.
The Shanghai Stock Exchange filing shows the company offered 37.5 million A-shares at 24.07 yuan per share, with retail investors allocated roughly 1.5 million shares through lottery. The institutional book, which closed oversubscribed, was not publicly disclosed. Unitree's IPO size places it among the largest robotics sector debuts on Chinese mainland exchanges since 2020, when several autonomous vehicle and drone makers went public at valuations between $4 billion and $7 billion.
DeepSeek, which achieved $5 billion in valuation following its reasoning model release, has not previously announced hardware manufacturing ventures. Tencent's robotics exposure now spans Unitree alongside its existing stakes in Boston Dynamics' parent company, Hyundai Motor Group. Unitree competes with established players including Boston Dynamics, Tesla's Optimus division and domestic Chinese rivals like Fourier Intelligence, which raised $50 million in a Series B round in 2023.
The IPO proceeds will fund research and development in humanoid platforms and expand manufacturing capacity, according to the prospectus. The Chinese robotics market attracted $8.3 billion in venture funding in 2024, up 22 percent from 2023, per Preqin data.
Retail demand of this magnitude for a robotics IPO on the mainland stems from both algorithmic trading patterns in STAR Market retail segments and investor appetite in the sector. The 0.018 percent winning rate means a retail applicant with a single lot had less than one in 5,000 odds of securing shares at the IPO price. Share allocation disparities of this scale have historically created first-day trading volatility and secondary-market premiums in Chinese IPOs, though not uniformly.
