Unitree Prepares for IPO — DeepSeek to Buy $20.8 Million in Shares

Chinese robot manufacturer Unitree has finalized its preparations for an initial public offering on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, setting the share price at 150.8 yuan ($22.34) and valuing the company at 61 billion yuan ($9.04 billion). The IPO aims to raise 6.1 billion yuan ($904 million) and will be the first by a robot manufacturer in mainland China. As part of the offering, Unitree signed a partnership with AI developer DeepSeek, which will invest 140.8 million yuan ($20.8 million) to acquire 933,399 shares, representing 2.31% of the total securities offered. Under the agreement, Unitree will prioritize DeepSeek when procuring model training services and technical solutions, while DeepSeek will prefer Unitree when purchasing robots and conducting research on embodied AI. The partnership addresses the challenge of creating a brain for humanoid robots that can navigate unfamiliar environments and reliably translate human commands into actions. While China produces many affordable robots that can walk, run, and dance, effective autonomous operation requires models trained on physical world data, including object manipulation and environmental response. Robot manufacturers train in data collection centers where humans repeatedly guide humanoid machines through tasks like folding clothes and opening doors. DeepSeek's AI models excel in programming, mathematics, and logical reasoning tests while operating at minimal cost; however, its strength lies in language models rather than multimodal ones. As a research project, DeepSeek has the VL2 system capable of handling visual and linguistic data, but it is not integrated into the flagship commercial model. In April, a DeepSeek researcher published materials on improving visual reasoning, but the article and related GitHub materials were subsequently withdrawn without explanation. The partnership with Unitree should help DeepSeek accelerate its work in this area.