Unitree's IPO Pop Puts It Above Figure AI's $39B
Startups / analysis
Unitree's IPO Pop Puts It Above Figure AI's $39B
China's robot makers pulled in $2.44 billion of August's $4.87 billion global robotics-funding total, and a one-day stock surge did more for Unitree's valuation than any 2026 funding round.
Robotics investments totaled $4.87 billion across 162 disclosed transactions in August 2026, The Robot Report said Sept. 17, and two China-based robot makers, Unitree Robotics and XPeng's robotics unit, accounted for nearly $1.8 billion of that total between them. China contributed about $2.44 billion of the month's disclosed funding, roughly half the global figure, against $1.27 billion from the United States.
An IPO and a private round, in the same month
Unitree and XPeng Robotics raised money in almost opposite ways. Unitree listed on Shanghai's STAR Market on Aug. 19, pricing its initial public offering at a $9 billion valuation and raising roughly $904 million. XPeng's robotics unit instead closed a $900 million private round on Aug. 25 at a $6.3 billion post-money valuation, with IDG Capital, Tencent and Alibaba named as investors and XPeng itself retaining 73.8% control. One route puts a company's stock in front of public traders on day one; the other keeps pricing inside a small group of named backers.
The valuation Unitree's trading day added
Unitree's shares jumped 460% on their first day of trading, Fortune reported, pushing the company's market value to roughly $66 billion, founded in 2016 by Wang Xingxing. That is well above the $39 billion valuation Figure AI, the closest US-based humanoid-robotics comparable, carried in a funding round in September 2025. Fortune reported the post-pop figure also put Unitree ahead of established Chinese technology companies including Baidu and JD.com. A single day of retail and institutional trading enthusiasm on a Shanghai exchange did more to Unitree's paper valuation than the IPO's own $9 billion offering price, or any private robotics funding round announced so far in 2026. Fortune's own headline called Unitree "famous for its dancing robots," a reputation the company built through years of online videos well before this week's listing paperwork was filed.
The two instruments also leave shareholders with different ways out. Unitree's public listing gives Wang Xingxing and its pre-IPO backers a tradable stock they can sell once any lockup period expires. XPeng Robotics' private round instead gives IDG Capital, Tencent and Alibaba a stake in a subsidiary that XPeng itself still controls with a 73.8% share, and there is no public market to exit through unless or until XPeng spins the unit off or lists it separately. That distinction matters more than the gap between the two valuations: a public market capitalization is only worth what another trader will pay for the stock that day, while a private valuation is untested until the company needs to raise money again.
- Unitree IPO price9 $ billions
- XPeng Robotics round6.3 $ billions
- Figure AI (Sept. 2025)39 $ billions
- Unitree, day-one close66 $ billions
Source: Fortune (Aug. 19, 2026) and Caixin Global (Aug. 25, 2026), accessed Sept. 20, 2026
What XPeng's own numbers say about its robotics unit
XPeng Robotics is building a humanoid called Iron, which the company has said it wants in mass production by the end of 2026 and in customer deployment in 2027, according to Caixin Global. That target sits against widening losses: the unit's pretax loss grew from 87 million yuan in 2024 to 369 million yuan in 2025. A $6.3 billion valuation for a unit that has not yet shipped its product at volume, and whose losses are getting larger rather than smaller, is a bet on the 2027 deployment date holding, not on results already on the books.
| Region | Disclosed robotics funding, August 2026 |
|---|---|
| China | About $2.44 billion |
| United States | $1.27 billion |
What the Robot Report's own tally leaves out
The Robot Report said the five largest disclosed transactions in August combined for more than $3.3 billion, but its own published count names only two of them, Unitree and XPeng, which is where most of the roughly $1.5 billion gap between the top five and the two named deals must sit. The Robot Report also flagged its own $4.87 billion figure as a floor rather than a ceiling: "the overall funding total is much higher as many of the funding totals are not made public," it said, without estimating by how much. The same report puts humanoid-specific funding at about $943.8 million for the month, or 19.4% of the total, and XPeng's $900 million round alone accounts for nearly all of that humanoid figure. Strip out that one deal and August's humanoid-robotics funding narrows to a few tens of millions of dollars, a reminder that a single-month category total can rest on one company's term sheet. That pattern in China's public robotics wave echoes a private one already playing out in the US, where XDOF and Mecka are both raising rounds to sell robot-training data rather than robots themselves, and where SoftBank has agreed to buy back the Robotics and AI Institute from Hyundai. The next concrete marker for the China side is whether Unitree's stock holds anywhere near its debut-day price once the initial trading enthusiasm cools, since a STAR Market listing has no lockup-driven test until early insiders are free to sell.
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