Unitree's own IPO filing: 74% of 2025 humanoid revenue came from research and schools, not factories
Unitree’s IPO results land today, with trading on Shanghai’s STAR Market expected to open next week. Buried in the prospectus that got it there is a number that matters more than the $9 billion valuation: a breakdown of who is actually buying the robots.
For 2025, research and education customers accounted for 74% of humanoid revenue and shipments — universities, labs and school programs, not businesses. Commercial and consumer buyers made up another 17%, much of it robots working as attractive promoters at retail openings, tourist sites and stage performances. Industrial applications were just 9% of shipments, and Unitree’s own numbers put only 3-4% of total humanoid shipments toward operational tasks like reception or inspection duty. The company’s stated reason: industrial deployment remains limited because the technology itself isn’t mature enough yet for messy, unstructured workplaces.
That context matters for anyone pricing a G1 at $13,500 or an H2 at $29,900 as a labor substitute: on Unitree’s own accounting, that’s not what most buyers are using them for today. The company shipped roughly 5,500 humanoids in 2025 — the highest volume of any maker — but the honest read is a research-and-demo product line with a fast-growing sideline in industrial pilots, not a factory-floor workforce yet.
The quadruped side of the business tells a different story. Go2 and its siblings skew far more toward commercial and industrial use, with genuine deployments in energy and logistics site inspection — the kind of repetitive, structured task that current robot autonomy actually handles well.
None of this is a knock on Unitree’s pricing, which the same filing shows running at gross margins above 60%. It’s a reminder that “for-sale” and “doing paid work” are different claims, and the prospectus itself — not a skeptic’s blog post — is now on record making the distinction.
Sources
Primary sources referenced in this article. Prices in the tables come from the live index and carry their own as-of dates.
- Unitree Robotics: Unitree G1 — official store page (shop.unitree.com)
- Unitree Robotics: H2 — official product page (unitree.com)
- Unitree Robotics: Unitree Go2 — official store page (shop.unitree.com)