A Chinese robotics company you may not have heard of has quietly become one of the biggest names in humanoid robots.
According to a profile by Charlie Campbell in Time, Hangzhou-based Unitree shipped 5,500 humanoid robots in 2025 — enough to account for more than 25% of the global market. The company is now preparing for an initial public offering in Shanghai, a move that would let outside investors buy in and signals confidence in its growth.
Humanoid robots — machines built to roughly resemble and move like people — have long been more spectacle than product. Getting them to do genuinely useful work in unpredictable, real-world settings remains hard.
That is where Unitree's software push comes in. According to eWeek, the company's latest AI could make home humanoid robots more practical, pointing to the kind of smarter, more adaptable control that would be needed for a robot to be useful around a house rather than just a demo on a stage.
Taken together, the two developments sketch a company trying to lead on both fronts at once: manufacturing scale, reflected in its shipment numbers and market share, and the AI needed to make the hardware actually worth owning.
Why it matters: if a single Chinese firm can already claim a quarter of humanoid robot shipments while readying a public listing and improving its AI, it suggests the race to put capable robots into workplaces and homes is moving faster — and consolidating around fewer players — than many casual observers assume.