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It's been a summer of big-time IPOs, with SpaceX, Jersey Mike's, and others going public. But this week, all eyes are on Unitree Robotics, which is expected to hit public markets on Wednesday.

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Unitree makes robotics, and is the world's largest humanoid robot maker — it's perhaps most well-known for its dancing robots, and those that have evidently learned kung-fu moves. It also makes four-legged robots, and its robots were even present at the 2022 Winter Olympics, and the 2023 Super Bowl, according to the company. It's based in Hangzhou, in eastern China, and was founded in 2016.

The company plans to list on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's tech-focused STAR Market, which is something akin to a China-based Nasdaq exchange. It's the same market that ChangXin Memory Technologies, or CXMT, recently listed on as well, and subsequently saw its stock shoot up more than 466%. 

Reporting from Reuters says that shares will trade at an initial price of around $22 each. The company already generated more than $900 million in its IPO last week. Additionally, the IPO was reportedly more than 8,000 times oversubscribed, setting a record for the STAR Market.

Notably, the company is also hitting public markets not long after the FCC effectively banned foreign-made humanoid robots. Last month, the FCC updated its Covered List, in a shot mostly at China, which controls a majority of the humanoid robot market. The updated Covered List bans those robots, citing national security issues. While many people have subsequently panicked about their ability to buy a Roomba, it's the type of robots produced by Unitree that was likely the true target of those changes.

While that may have, in part, been an effort to protect U.S. robotics companies from competitors — similar to how Chinese electric vehicles are effectively banned in the U.S. — those companies are relatively small compared to their Chinese counterparts. Perhaps the best-known firms are Standard Bots and Boston Dynamics, though there are several others, as well as larger companies, like Tesla, in the space.

With that in mind, a June 2026 report from Counterpoint Research frames the IPO, and the humanoid robot market at large, as another avenue through which the U.S. and China are going to duke it out for AI, technological, and economic supremacy. 

"As Unitree prepares for its IPO, this report argues that China may not need to win the first round of this race by building the most intelligent robot. It can also win by building enough robots at low cost to create the real-world data and field-learning loop that gradually hardens the intelligence layer," it reads. "Humanoid robotics is becoming a new front in the US-China AI race."

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