Unitree's Financing Story: Angel Investors Achieved a 1035x Return
On August 19, Unitree Robotics (688836) was officially listed on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board, becoming the "first A-share humanoid robot stock". From the acceptance of its IPO application on March 20, 2026, to the successful review on June 1, Unitree only took 73 days in the whole process, which not only surpassed the 88 days of Moore Threads, but also set the fastest review record since the implementation of the "pre-review" mechanism of the Sci-Tech Innovation Board.
Behind this fastest review record is the collective vote of the capital market for the scarcity of "hard technology" assets. Looking back, however, Unitree started with a seed round financing of more than 10 million yuan in 2016, and it has taken a full 10 years to reach a market value of 450 billion yuan now.
Over the past 10 years, Yin Fangming, who initially invested 2 million yuan, has reaped an astonishing return of 1035 times at a market value of 450 billion yuan with his continuous accompanying investment.
At the same time, the market value leap of 450 billion yuan is not only a breakthrough from 0 to 1 in China's embodied intelligence industry, but also sets the first valuation benchmark in the public market for the robot track which is still in the early stage of development. So, in this long journey through the cycle, what special traits does Unitree have that can attract early capital to bet? In those years full of prejudice and questioning, how did Unitree turn those seemingly "adventurous" and "high-stakes" investments into must-have options for capital to pour in?
Today, let's look back again to see how Unitree and Wang Xingxing started from scratch step by step and built the "first humanoid robot stock"?
"Rebel" in the unpopular track, why did early investors dare to bet?
Retracing the history, Unitree Robotics was born in 2016 in a 50-square-meter humble office in Binjiang District, Hangzhou. At that time, the concept of domestic service robots was just emerging, but quadruped robots were still a very niche track in China. On the other side of the ocean, Boston Dynamics' products were bulky and expensive at that time, with a commercialization prospect far away, and the capital market had almost zero enthusiasm for this field.
It was under this background that angel investor Yin Fangming made a bold decision. In August 2016, he invested 2 million yuan to acquire 15% of the shares of Unitree Robotics, with a post-investment valuation of only 13 million yuan. This investment was not based on traditional industry research, but out of trust in Wang Xingxing himself.
At that time, Wang Xingxing had just graduated from Shanghai University not long ago. The XDOG robot he developed during his postgraduate period once won the second prize of the Shanghai Robot Competition, and his technical talent was well-known in the circle. Optimistic about this tech geek, Yin Fangming made a decisive bet. As an early angel investment, "investing in people" is often more important than "investing in the track".
If Yin Fangming's angel round investment still has the emotional color of "personal vision", then DJI's entry in 2018 made Unitree enter the vision of industrial capital for the first time. In April 2018, DJI acquired about 17% of the shares of Unitree Robotics with 10.1286 million yuan, once becoming the largest external shareholder. What DJI valued was Unitree's accumulation in the underlying control technology of robots, which was exactly the same as the path of DJI's rise: firmly grasp the core technology in hand.
Almost in the same period, Anchuang Technology and Variable Capital entered the angel round, with a post-investment valuation of about 60 million yuan. Since then, Unitree's early shareholder lineup has begun to expand from "individuals" to "institutions".
However, it is sighing that DJI chose to reduce capital and withdraw only one year after holding the shares. At that time, there was still no clear commercialization path for quadruped robots, and the application scenarios were limited to laboratory research of scientific research institutions. For a drone giant that had been highly commercialized, this investment might be a little too "early" or "non-mainstream". But if DJI had held the shares until now, the corresponding market value of this part of equity after listing would have reached tens of billions - a number that makes any onlooker feel sorry, let alone DJI was once the largest external shareholder that intervened the earliest.
Shortly afterwards, at the end of 2019, Unitree came into the sight of HSG Seed Fund. HSG led the investment in the Pre-A round financing, and Duxin Investment followed the investment. Unitree's valuation reached 150 million yuan. In this period, HSG's entry, to some extent, is more like labeling this unpopular track as "worthy of attention".
Later, the managing director of HSG who led this investment recalled that the reason why HSG dared to take action in the non-consensus was that the founder's Outlier trait impressed him. His first impression of Wang Xingxing at that time was that he had great enthusiasm for technology and products: "He is confident enough in the products he makes, and has a lot of cutting-edge thoughts on the development of robots, extremely focused, keen on research, and strong in learning ability."
More importantly, at the investment decision meeting, Wang Xingxing described the visions such as "building robots larger than Ultraman" and "building micron-level robots that can enter blood vessels", as well as the scale capability of "robots making robots", which made investors see possibilities far beyond the current commercial returns in the controversy. All these made Li Yannan confirm that "this is a project worthy of being promoted as soon as possible".
But what really made HSG decide to take action is that for early-stage projects, HSG attaches more importance to the degree of "person-position matching" of entrepreneurs.
In the investment opinion, HSG's evaluation of Wang Xingxing is: a typical outlier, the preacher of quadruped robots in China. This is reflected in HSG's scoring system, where the two dimensions of Outlier and Vision were given 9 points (full score 10).
At the same time, as an entrepreneur, Wang Xingxing also has several obvious characteristics: strong principle - he revised many drafts of TS and NDA during financing, and the Word document was densely filled with his comments. In every communication of financing documents and terms, he would check every word of the wording; maintain high-frequency continuous innovation - since the start of the business, new products have been launched on average every half a year; everything is customer-centric - he has emphasized many times that "I will only do what my customers need"; unite the core team - none of the core executives have left since the founding of the business.
This makes HSG always believe that the entrepreneur's strengths are more important in the early stage, and it is more important to give full play to the strengths to the extreme than to consider how to solve the shortcomings in the short term. For this reason, after leading the Pre-A round financing, HSG continued to lead the Pre-A+ round in the second quarter of 2020, and continuously increased its positions in the B and C rounds. So far, HSG has become the largest independent private equity fund shareholder of Unitree, and Unitree has also become the first listed RMB project of HSG Seed Fund, which will create rich returns for the LPs of HSG RMB Fund.
In this round of financing, Vertex Ventures also completed the investment in Unitree's Pre-A+ round as the only newly entered institutional investor, becoming one of the earliest institutional shareholders.
From "being misunderstood" to "scrambling for shares", the collective positioning of leading institutions
When it came to 2020, Unitree Robotics launched Unitree A1 with a weight of only 12kg, and its technical maturity was greatly improved. Even so, the judgment of "no clear application scenario, cannot be scaled up" was still the consensus of most investors in the industry. At that time, the outside world's doubts about "what exactly can robot dogs do" never dissipated.
However, not all investors were coerced by this consensus. Vertex Ventures was the first to enter amid these doubts. As early as 2018, when the video of Boston Dynamics' robot dog was widely spread, Zheng Juncong, founding managing partner of Vertex Ventures, judged that "China will definitely give birth to similar hard technology enterprises" and immediately asked the team to search all over the network. In 2020, when Unitree came into his sight, Zheng Juncong personally went to Hangzhou to meet Wang Xingxing.
In that decisive meeting, Wang Xingxing clearly dismantled the path of motor weight reduction design and customized parts, which made Zheng Juncong convinced that "this is a person who really understands technology and knows how to implement it". What impressed him more was that Wang Xingxing did not blindly cater to the then red-hot AI wave. In 2020, when OpenAI released GPT-3 and DeepMind's AlphaFold2 made breakthroughs, artificial intelligence once again became the hottest topic in the global technology circle. Countless startups rushed to label themselves with AI to win capital favor.
But Wang Xingxing did not rush to transform or package concepts. Instead, he adopted a pragmatic attitude to be honest about the current technical status, focusing on the core engineering problems such as motor weight reduction and customized parts that are the most important at present. At the same time, in Zheng Juncong's impression, even if Unitree scored 10 points, Wang Xingxing was only willing to say 6 or 7 points.
In Zheng Juncong's eyes, such entrepreneurs are exactly what Vertex Ventures expects for "entrepreneurs who really do technology". In October 2020, Vertex Ventures completed an investment of tens of millions of yuan in Unitree Robotics' Pre-A+ round; this investment at that time was not so much a judgment based on commercial data as an "imagination" based on technology trends. Zheng Juncong called it - "breakthrough innovation is the top priority", that is, application scenarios will gradually emerge as technology matures.
It was after 2021 that leading institutions' collective positioning at key nodes really made Unitree move from "being misunderstood" to "scrambling for shares".
In July 2021, Shunwei Capital exclusively completed the A round investment with 10 million US dollars, and the valuation jumped to 800-1 billion yuan. Shunwei, which is under Lei Jun's banner, has long laid out in the robot track. This exclusive bet marks that Unitree has entered a new cycle of "commercialization acceleration" from "technology verification". Later, in April 2022, Matrix Partners China and Dunhong Assets jointly led the B round of several hundred million yuan, with investments from Shenzhen Venture Capital, Hexagon, Rongyi Investment and other institutions, and the valuation rose to about 1 billion yuan.
Among them, Matrix Partners is famous for "daring to make heavy investments", and its entry means that leading financial investors have once again recognized Unitree's commercial prospects; while Shenzhen Venture Capital's investment labeled Unitree with the endorsement of "state-owned capital". An investor who participated in the B round recalled that the share was already in short supply at that time, "getting the quota of the round led by Matrix Partners is itself a kind of endorsement".
Since then, Unitree's financing has begun to accelerate. In February 2024, Meituan made a heavy investment of nearly 1 billion yuan in the B2 round, with Source Code Capital, Golden Stone Investment following up synchronously. Old shareholders such as Shenzhen Venture Capital and Rongyi Investment continued to follow the investment, and Photosynthetic Venture Capital also entered the round, jointly pushing the valuation up to 3.1 billion yuan. Through this round of investment, Meituan became an important strategic shareholder of Unitree Robotics, and further increased its positions in the B3 round in September 2024 and the C round financing in June 2025, eventually becoming the largest external institutional shareholder of Unitree.
Since then, Unitree's shareholder structure has also changed accordingly, that is, transforming from "financial investment" to "industrial collaboration".
However, what really made the market boil was the C+ round financing in June 2025. In the eyes of the outside world, this was almost the last and only channel to enter Unitree - you know, in this year, Unitree's H1 humanoid robot "Fuxi" performed a "cyber yangko dance" in the "YangkoBOT" program on the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, which not only amazed the whole country, with the total views exceeding 100 million across the network, but also made Unitree overnight from a to B technology company to a national-level to C brand.
The national-level influence, coupled with the strength of the world's largest shipment volume of humanoid robots, made this round of financing a must-contest place for industrial capital. With the entry of giants such as funds under China Mobile, Tencent, Alibaba, Ant Group, Geely Capital, and Jinqiu Fund, the financing scale of about 700 million yuan almost covers a list of shareholders with the most powerful industrial capital influence in China.
Jinqiu Fund entered the market at this time. Although this is not a story from 0 to 1, it is not a simple "chasing consensus". Before investing in Unitree, Jinqiu has laid out the whole embodied intelligence industrial chain from sensors, joints to brains and bodies, covering more than ten companies. In the view of Zang Tianyu, partner of Jinqiu Fund, the hardware solution has become mature, and the focus of the next round of competition lies in intelligence, scenarios and ecology. But what really impressed Jinqiu Fund was the sentence that Wang Xingxing repeatedly mentioned - "to make robots at the price of iron lumps".
When everyone is talking about large models today, Unitree chose to maximize the performance of the ontology, with solid supply chain and engineering capabilities, becoming the world's first profitable humanoid robot company before IPO. This once again verified Zang Tianyu's long-standing judgment: only with the breakthrough of hardware engineering capabilities can embodied intelligence take the first step towards commercialization.
From the Internet to communications, from automobile manufacturing to fintech, all kinds of leading players are competing for shares at the same poker table, making Unitree a "sweet pastry" in the eyes of capital, and its valuation jumped to 12.7 billion yuan. Most importantly, as a company that has been founded for nearly 9 years, Unitree is no longer the laboratory project that "sold dozens of units a year" in the past.
The prospectus shows that Unitree Robotics' performance has seen explosive growth in 2025: revenue soared from 159 million yuan in 2023 to 1.699 billion yuan in 2025, with a three-year compound annual growth rate as high as 226.78%; the non-recurring profit and loss deducted net profit even reversed from -18 million yuan in 2023 to a profit of nearly 600 million yuan in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 674.29%. At the same time, the shipment volume of Unitree's bipedal humanoid robots also exceeded 5500 units, ranking first in the world.
Imagination of the trillion-level market, listing is just the starting point
With Unitree's listing, its valuation has soared from the initial 13 million yuan to 4500 billion yuan, and capital returns have also emerged. In the early Pre-A round, HSG Seed Fund and Duxin Investment, which took the lead in placing bets, reaped 585 times of returns with their keen vision. In October 2020, in the Pre-A+ round, as the only newly entered institutional investor - Vertex Ventures also reaped a lot, with a floating profit of hundreds of times.
In the subsequent series of B rounds of financing, institutions such as Matrix Partners China, Dunhong Assets, Shenzhen Venture Capital, Shunwei, Meituan, Rongyi Investment, Source Code Capital, Hexagon, Photosynthetic Venture Capital, and Initial Capital entered the market one after another, reaping dozens of times of returns; even in the last round of financing before IPO, the giants who competed for shares have achieved more than 10 times of returns on the book.
As for angel investor Yin Fangming, after sowing the initial 2 million yuan "seed", the value of his remaining equity is still as high as about 496 million yuan; only DJI, which chose to withdraw in those years, became the biggest regret in this wave of capital returns.
But what excites investors most may not be just the numbers in front of them. Zheng Juncong from Vertex Ventures judges that the robot market will far exceed the space economy with a scale of 28 trillion US dollars - "Automobile is one of the largest manufacturing industries in the world, but each person only needs at most one car. Robots are different. A family may own multiple units: companion robots, housework robots, errand robots. The ceiling of the robot industry is higher than that of the automobile industry."
It is worth mentioning that in the strategic placement list on the eve of Unitree's IPO, the entry of institutions such as DeepSeek, PetroChina Kunlun Capital, China Southern Power Grid Industrial Finance, and China Telecom has also made the outside world full of expectations for the rise of China's technological strength. Especially the entry of DeepSeek allows Unitree to have deeper synergy depth in the technology of "embodied intelligence + large model".
Previously, Liang Wenfeng once outlined the roadmap of AGI in an internal exchange meeting - that is, from language models to Chain of Thought (CoT), Agent