China's most famous robot maker just gave Wall Street a new definition of "moonshot." Shares of Unitree Robotics — the Hangzhou startup behind those viral kung-fu-kicking, backflipping humanoid machines — rocketed as much as 629% above their IPO price within seconds of opening on Shanghai's tech-focused STAR Market on Wednesday, before settling into a still-jaw-dropping 460% first-day gain.

The stock priced its initial public offering at 150.80 yuan (about $21) a share, raising roughly 6.1 billion yuan ($904 million). When trading opened, it briefly spiked to 1,100 yuan, handing the company a market capitalization near 445 billion yuan (about $66 billion) — bigger, at that instant, than most established industrial giants. By the closing bell it had cooled to 845 yuan, still leaving Unitree worth roughly 342 billion yuan (near $50 billion), according to the South China Morning Post.

Retail investors could not get enough. Nearly 9.8 million brokerage accounts chased just 9.7 million shares set aside for individual buyers, an oversubscription so extreme that Unitree becomes China's first humanoid robot maker to list on a mainland exchange — and, for founder Wang Xingxing, an overnight fortune. His roughly 121.4 million shares were worth about 103 billion yuan ($15 billion) at Wednesday's close. Wang, now 36, built his first bipedal robot for under $30 as a university student in 2009 before founding Unitree in 2016.

A bet on robots that still can't do the dishes

The debut landed squarely amid Beijing's World Robot Conference and defied a rough day for the broader market — the STAR Market Composite sank 7.2% and the Shanghai Composite fell 2.4% on the same session, according to CNBC. That divergence has analysts split on whether Unitree is a genuine embodied-AI breakthrough or the latest sign of frothy speculation in China's robotics sector.

The skepticism isn't quiet. At its opening price, Unitree briefly traded near 1,200 times trailing earnings — a multiple that assumes years of flawless execution. Hao Hong, managing partner at Lotus Asset Management, put it bluntly: the robots "can dance and all that — but never seen them doing any real housework." Omdia's chief analyst Lian Jye Su noted that Chinese retail buyers tend to chase hype, warning the industry "is still in a very nascent stage."

The underlying business is real, if still small. Unitree's 2025 revenue roughly quadrupled to about 1.7 billion yuan ($252 million), and it turned an adjusted profit near 591 million yuan — rare for a humanoid robot startup. But first-quarter profit this year actually fell 52% even as revenue climbed 68%, a wrinkle that valuation bulls are choosing to look past for now.

Unitree, which shipped roughly 5,500 humanoid units in 2025 to lead the global category, competes with Tesla's Optimus program and Boston Dynamics as investors worldwide race to price the next generation of factory and household robots. Wednesday's frenzy suggests that, for now at least, China's retail investors are placing an enormous bet that Unitree gets there first.