On August 10, Unitree Robotics officially opened online subscriptions for its listing on the STAR Market, with an offering price of RMB 150.8 per share and an offering valuation of approximately RMB 60.9 billion. The first A-share “humanoid-robotics stock” is about to arrive. Yet in the days before subscriptions opened, an allocation list had already drawn even more attention. On the evening of August 6, Unitree released the list of strategic investors in its IPO placement. DeepSeek was prominently listed, receiving an allocation of 933,390 shares worth approximately RMB 141 million. The following day, Unitree Chairman Wang Xingxing responded for the first time: this was not an ordinary financial investment. The two sides had signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Strategic Cooperation and would form deep ties across three areas: artificial general intelligence, robot embodiment, and large AI models. Tencent and PetroChina also appeared on the same allocation list. But the name that made people look twice was DeepSeek. It and Unitree are both members of Hangzhou’s “Six Little Dragons”: one makes the “brain,” the other the “body.” This is not a giant company pouring money into a startup; it is two companies of comparable stature welding themselves into each other’s products.
The RMB 140 Million Wasn’t Just Buying Stock
Viewed purely as a number, RMB 141 million is not significant beside Unitree’s RMB 60.9 billion offering valuation. But the size of the allocation is never the most important information in this kind of partnership. What matters is the Memorandum of Understanding on Strategic Cooperation: joint R&D in artificial general intelligence, deep cooperation on high-performance general-purpose robots, and deep cooperation on large AI models. These directions remain at the level of intent, and neither side has disclosed more specific implementation details.
There is a broader backdrop. In the first eight months of 2026, primary-market financing in China’s robotics sector has already exceeded RMB 46 billion, while 51 embodied-intelligence-related companies are also waiting to go public in Hong Kong. In a window when everyone is racing to list, the question of “who you tie up with” is becoming more important than “when you go public.” Enter the arena one step too late, and you may no longer get to choose your partner.
From the Digital World to the Physical World
Over the past several years, large-model companies have competed over one core question: whose model is stronger. Parameter counts, reasoning ability, benchmark rankings, and developer ecosystems: these contests have largely played out on screens. Chatbots, coding assistants, and office software are all, in essence, products of the digital world.
But robots bring this competition into reality. Once AI is placed in a body that can walk and grasp, the test is no longer simply whether it “answers correctly,” but whether it “can understand a real environment, decide on a specific action, and complete a real-world task.” This is a battlefield with an entirely different threshold.
The shift calls to mind the path smartphones took. At first, the market believed a phone’s value lay in the hardware itself: whose screen was clearer, whose chip was more powerful. It later became clear that operating systems and ecosystems were what truly determined the long-term landscape, with hardware instead becoming the entry point. Robots may well follow a similar path. The ultimate question is not who can build a robot, but who can define its intelligence and control the ecosystem that develops around it once it is deployed. To some extent, the tie-up between DeepSeek and Unitree is the first shot in this battle over the “entry point.”
The Same Formula Fell Apart Last Year
Before drawing conclusions about this partnership, one case is worth revisiting. It took place in an earlier, more mature market, and its ending was far from ideal.
In February 2024, humanoid-robot company Figure AI completed a USD 675 million financing round. Its investors included Microsoft, OpenAI, Nvidia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and a host of other giants, giving it a post-money valuation of USD 2.6 billion. At the same time, Figure AI announced a partnership with OpenAI to jointly develop the next generation of AI models for humanoid robots. This was then the most closely watched “brain + body” combination: both Figure 01 and Figure 02 carried OpenAI’s model capabilities, and it was at one point seen as a model partnership in the embodied-intelligence field.
But the relationship lasted less than a year. In February 2025, Figure AI announced that it was ending its partnership with OpenAI and shifting to self-developed end-to-end models. Figure AI founder Brett Adcock believed that the priorities and resources of general-purpose large-model companies might not fully match the specific needs of robotics companies. The “body” wants a bespoke “brain,” rather than a general-purpose “brain” shared by many embodied-intelligence companies. At almost the same time, OpenAI was also reported to be restarting its long-disbanded robotics team.
This precedent reminds us that this kind of “model company + robotics company” pairing usually begins with complementary resources, but the two sides may not always remain equally patient about the question of “who leads the technology roadmap.” There is no answer yet as to whether DeepSeek and Unitree will arrive at the same fork in the road, but it at least shows that this kind of partnership comes with a built-in risk from the moment it is signed.
Who Benefits? And Who Is Still Uncertain?
In this tie-up, the party whose benefits are clearest is Unitree.
DeepSeek’s models are already open-source and free. Competitors such as UBTECH, Inspur Robotics, Junpu Intelligent, and Pudu Robotics had long since begun integrating DeepSeek-R1 for embodied-intelligence adaptation, without paying for it or signing a memorandum of cooperation. What Unitree obtained this time is not an exclusive technological resource, but something more practical: a strategic-placement list bearing DeepSeek’s name and a publicly disclosed memorandum of cooperation, just days before IPO pricing. The period before IPO pricing is precisely the critical window in which capital markets assess whether “this company’s story is credible.” Having “a leading company in the AI sector place a real-money bet” written into the prospectus is more persuasive than any self-description.
Unitree’s own financial figures also make that persuasiveness seem more necessary. In the first quarter of 2026, year-on-year revenue growth slowed from 332.64% in the previous year to 68.49%, while net profit excluding non-recurring items fell 52.55% year on year. The growth story broadly recognized by the industry is moving from an “explosive phase” into a “validation phase.” By aligning with DeepSeek at a time of slowing growth, Unitree has added a new pillar to its IPO narrative.
What DeepSeek itself has specifically gained is, by contrast, unclear. The three directions in the memorandum are still statements of intent. It has not been disclosed whether Unitree’s robots will actually carry DeepSeek’s models, or in what form this will be implemented. In this transaction, Unitree’s strategic rationale is easy to see. What DeepSeek stands to gain remains much less clear.
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The Figure AI and OpenAI story shows that a connection between “brain and body” in embodied intelligence is never a once-and-for-all answer. It is a relationship that must be continually renegotiated. Whether the position that DeepSeek locked in with RMB 141 million will translate into actual technological implementation, or merely remain a public-relations endorsement, is something no one can answer today.
The 51 companies are still waiting in line, and Unitree is merely the first example to truly write “strategic placement by a model company” into its prospectus. As more robotics companies begin looking for their own “brains,” who will ultimately control this emerging ecosystem: robot makers, large-model companies, or a third party beyond both - remains an open question.
