Unitree Robotics

The joints of today's humanoid robots come from a short list of gear and actuator makers: Harmonic Drive Systems and Nabtesco in Japan, Leaderdrive, Tuopu and Sanhua in China, and Schaeffler in Germany, while Tesla, Figure and Unitree design key parts themselves. Filings show orders reaching the Japanese incumbents first, yet Tesla's stated Fremont capacity alone implies 25 million to 30 million joint actuators a year, about 22 times the 1.15 million precision reducers Nabtesco can make annually.

Skild AI's $1.4 billion Series C, led by SoftBank, and Figure AI's $1 billion Series C, led by Parkway Venture Capital, are the two largest humanoid and embodied-AI rounds in ROBOTNESS's verified records since January 2025, and together make up 41% of the $5.86 billion disclosed across 22 rounds. Humanoid makers took 70% of disclosed money in 2025, but developers of robot foundation models have taken 71% in 2026 so far, and NVIDIA joined seven rounds without leading one.

A vision-language-action (VLA) model is one neural network that reads camera images and a plain-language instruction and outputs a robot's next motor commands, built by training a vision-language model on robot demonstrations. Google DeepMind, Physical Intelligence, NVIDIA, Figure AI, Skild AI and AgiBot lead, and the commercial race now turns on the cost of action data rather than model design.

Zhuhai-based Amicro, which designs robot-specific chips, sensors and navigation software for cleaning and service robots, published its post-hearing information pack on the Hong Kong exchange on 30 September 2026 and is seeking a Main Board listing under Chapter 18C. Revenue rose 42.3% to RMB406.7 million in 2025 on more than 3.5 million solution sets sold, while the net loss widened to RMB155.1 million.

Shipments of professional service robots rose 24% to almost 250,000 units in 2025, led by 117,500 transport and logistics robots, the International Federation of Robotics said on 30 September 2026. The IFR counted about 7,000 full-size humanoids sold worldwide and 174 humanoid makers, more than half of them in China, and said most humanoid uses still rely on teleoperation.

Direct Drive Tech, which makes direct-drive motor modules for household and wheel-legged robots, raised HK$1,080.0 million when it listed in Hong Kong on 29 September 2026. Robot-vacuum sensor supplier Camsense followed on 30 September with HK$682.0 million after retail investors oversubscribed its public tranche 3,546.91 times. Both companies depend on five customers for more than 80% of sales, their filings show.

Global humanoid robot shipments reached nearly 25,000 units in the first half of 2026, up 432.1% year on year, with market value above $740 million, IDC said on September 29. China took about 77.9% of shipments, Chinese vendors supplied more than 95%, and IDC raised its 2030 forecast by about 50% to more than 750,000 units.

Singapore-based Sharpa launched three products at IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh: the D01 robot with whole-body electronic skin, the W02 hand with 21 active degrees of freedom at under 750 grams, and the AE01 haptic glove for teleoperation and data capture. Together they give the company the hardware to collect, replay and learn from touch-rich manipulation data.

D-Robotics, the robot-chip business Horizon Robotics stopped consolidating in March, said on 17 September 2026 it had closed a US$400 million Series C without naming a single investor or a valuation. The company says it has shipped more than 8 million Sunrise chips and that its newest S600 part won more than 20 robot customers within six months, including UBTECH, Fourier and Booster Robotics.

XPeng said on September 8, 2026 that its IRON humanoid robot has started coming off a production line with more than 80% of core processes automated, ahead of mass production at the end of 2026 and deliveries in 2027. Two weeks earlier its robotics subsidiary Dogotix agreed to raise more than US$900 million at a post-money valuation above US$6.3 billion, including US$600 million from IDG Capital, Alibaba, Tencent and Gaorong Ventures.

Churchill Capital Corp XI filed a Form S-4 with the SEC on September 4, 2026 for its $2.5 billion merger with Agility Robotics, the maker of the Digit humanoid, which plans to trade on Nasdaq as AGLT. The filing discloses 2025 net sales of $1.78 million, a net loss of $138.1 million, a $100 million SAFE raised in July 2026 and a single customer commitment of $300 million for Digit v5.

UBTech Robotics said revenue doubled to RMB1,269.1 million in the six months to June 30, 2026, driven by RMB590.3 million of full-size humanoid robot sales, up from RMB38.2 million a year earlier. The Hong Kong-listed company sold 921 Walker-class units and narrowed its loss for the period by 23.0% to RMB338.8 million, while one customer accounted for 24% of revenue.

A Tsinghua University team working with ByteDance Seed and China Agricultural University published a reinforcement learning controller in Science Robotics on August 19, 2026 that links a humanoid's camera directly to its legs. On Booster Robotics' T1, the authors report a 46% cut in ball-position error, up to 64% faster time-to-kick and about 90% kick success in frontfield positions, with no real-world fine-tuning.

Unitree Robotics began trading in Shanghai on August 19, 2026 under code 688836 after selling 40.4 million new shares at RMB150.80, raising gross proceeds of RMB6,099.32 million. The issue price values the Hangzhou humanoid and quadruped maker at about RMB60.99 billion, or 219.23 times 2025 earnings, against an industry average of 38.56 times cited in its own listing document.

NVIDIA released Cosmos 3 Edge on July 20, the smallest member of its Cosmos 3 physical-AI model family, as open weights on Hugging Face. The 4-billion-parameter model runs on Jetson Thor and generates 32 robot actions per inference, and Doosan Robotics, Siemens, Agile Robots and Skild AI are evaluating it.

China's industry ministry said on July 20, 2026 that more than 230 companies have released over 400 embodied AI robot models and that full-year output of complete machines is expected to exceed 100,000 units. Official data show industrial robot output rose 28% in the first half and 29.0% to 729,352 sets in the first eight months, as Beijing pushes humanoids into real factories through a joint programme with the state asset regulator.

FlashSAC, an off-policy reinforcement learning method from a team spanning Holiday Robotics, KAIST, KRAFTON, TU Darmstadt, KTH and others, won the Outstanding Paper Award at Robotics: Science and Systems 2026 in Sydney. The authors report training a Unitree G1 walking policy in about 20 minutes on a single RTX 5090, against about three hours for the standard PPO method.

Hugging Face released version 0.6.0 of its open-source LeRobot robotics library on July 7, adding three world-model policies, five vision-language-action models including NVIDIA's GR00T N1.7, two reward models and six simulation benchmarks. NVIDIA said a day earlier that it is bringing GR00T, Isaac Teleop, Isaac Lab-Arena, Jetson Thor support and, soon, Cosmos 3 into LeRobot.

Zurich-based ANYbotics said on June 16, 2026 it had opened an office at the DFactory Barcelona Industry 4.0 campus to expand engineering in computer vision, machine learning, software, mechatronics and DevOps. The site becomes its third hub after Zurich and San Francisco, following a Yokogawa software partnership in February and the hiring of a chief revenue officer in March.

China's industry ministry and its state-asset regulator have launched a 2026 special action that requires each provincial region to open at least 20 real-world training scenes and each central state-owned enterprise at least 10. The notice, dated June 3 and published June 8, sets a year-end goal of more than 100 high-value application scenarios and the ability to deploy humanoid and embodied AI robots at a scale of tens of thousands of units.

OmniRetarget, a motion retargeting method from Amazon's Frontier AI & Robotics team and university collaborators, won both the Best Conference Paper Award and the Best Paper Award on Robot Manipulation and Locomotion at IEEE ICRA 2026 in Vienna. The method preserves contacts between body, objects and terrain, and the authors used it to generate more than 8 hours of trajectories that trained a Unitree G1 to perform parkour and box carrying in the real world without real-robot fine-tuning.

NVIDIA announced at GTC Taipei on June 1, 2026 an Isaac GR00T reference humanoid for academic research, built on Unitree's H2 Plus body with two 22-degree-of-freedom Sharpa Wave tactile hands and a Jetson AGX Thor T5000 computer. Unitree will sell it from late 2026; Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford and UC San Diego are the first named research users. No price was given.

Korea's trade ministry said on May 29 that the AI robot division of its M.AX manufacturing alliance now has about 280 members and is running industrial humanoid pilots with HD Hyundai Heavy Industries, SK Energy and BGF. It also highlighted Korean robot foundation models, a 13 km/h humanoid lower body from KAIST and plans for a 500 billion won fund with a mandatory humanoid share.

UBTech Robotics said on April 24 that it had completed the transfer of shares tendered in its partial offer for Zhejiang Fenglong Electric, taking its holding to 93,979,906 A shares, about 43.01% of the company. The Hong Kong-listed humanoid maker paid RMB17.72 a share in both steps of a deal worth up to RMB1.67 billion and later amended terms to nominate seven of eight Fenglong directors.

The 2026 Beijing E-Town humanoid half marathon on April 19 drew more than 100 robot teams from 13 provinces, against five provinces a year earlier, and about 40% of robots navigated on their own. The winning robot, Lightning of the Qitian Dasheng team, finished the 21.0975-kilometre course in 50:26 while the men's human winner ran 1:07:47, according to the Beijing municipal government.

Shanghai-based AgiBot told its 2026 partner conference on April 17 that revenue grew from RMB300,000 in 2023 to more than RMB1 billion in 2025, and that its ten-thousandth robot had rolled off the line this year. The company launched four hardware lines including the full-size Expedition A3, six models and a five-year ecosystem programme worth more than RMB2 billion.

UBTech Robotics said in its 2025 annual results that revenue from full-size humanoid robots rose 2,203.7% to RMB820.6 million on 1,079 units, lifting group revenue 53.3% to RMB2.0 billion. The net loss narrowed to RMB789.8 million, while three share placings raised RMB5.78 billion to fund capacity for more than 6,000 robots a year.

Shanghai-based AgiBot said on 30 March 2026 that its 10,000th humanoid robot had come off the production line, 112 days after it announced its 5,000th. The company said the step from 5,000 to 10,000 units ran four times faster than earlier phases, but its own December breakdown shows that only about a third of its fleet is full-size.

The Shanghai Stock Exchange accepted Unitree Robotics' application to list on the STAR Market on March 20, 2026, with the Hangzhou company seeking RMB4.202 billion. Its prospectus shows reviewed 2025 revenue of RMB1,708.21 million, up 335.36%, and more than 5,500 humanoids shipped in 2025, with humanoids overtaking quadrupeds as its largest product line.

Mind Robotics, the industrial AI robotics company founded and led by Rivian chief executive RJ Scaringe, said on March 11, 2026 that Accel and Andreessen Horowitz co-led a $500 million Series A, about four months after a $115 million seed. Rivian's filings show it deconsolidated the start-up in March, valued its remaining 37.6% at about $569 million using the Series A share price and recorded a $506 million gain, which by ROBOTNESS arithmetic implies an equity value near $1.51 billion.

Hyundai Motor Group agreed on February 27, 2026 to invest about 9 trillion won from 2026 in a robotics, AI and hydrogen hub at Saemangeum in North Jeolla. The plan includes a 400 billion won robot cluster with a finished-robot factory sized for about 30,000 units a year, a contract-manufacturing foundry and a parts complex, due in 2029, next to a 5.8 trillion won AI data centre scaled in phases to 50,000 GPUs.

Shenzhen-based LimX Dynamics said on 2 February 2026 it had closed a US$200 million Series B with investors including Stone Venture, JD, Oriental Fortune Capital, CoStone Capital and SAIC-backed Shangqi Capital. The round came three weeks after the launch of LimX COSA, the agentic operating system that runs its full-size humanoid Oli, and the company added a second US$200 million pre-IPO round 162 days later.

Figure AI on Jan. 27, 2026 released Helix 02, a robot foundation model that runs a humanoid from camera pixels and fingertip touch down to joint commands at 1 kHz, replacing 109,504 lines of hand-written C++ with a 10-million-parameter learned controller. The company showed a Figure 03 unloading and reloading a dishwasher across a full kitchen in a four-minute, 61-action run it says had no resets and no teleoperation.

Mobileye agreed on 5 January 2026 to buy Israeli humanoid developer Mentee Robotics for $900 million in cash and stock and closed the deal on 3 February. Its filings show chief executive Amnon Shashua, Mentee's chairman and co-founder, receives about $341 million and chief technology officer Shai Shalev-Shwartz about $118 million, with 90% of the founders' stock released only after two and four years. Mentee targets autonomous customer pilots in 2026 and series production in 2028.