American humanoids cost $260m to ship

FIGURE AI carries a $39bn post-money valuation. Its closest American rival, Apptronik, was marked at $5bn in February. Figure shipped about 150 humanoid robots in 2025, according to data cited in Unitree Robotics' IPO prospectus. Across the Pacific, six Chinese makers — Unitree, UBTECH, AgiBot, Leju, EngineAI and Fourier — took the top six spots in Omdia's global humanoid shipment rankings, with Unitree alone moving 5,500 units.

The investment narrative around humanoids in the West has been almost entirely platform-shaped. Figure's $1bn Series C in September 2025, led by Parkway with NVIDIA, Brookfield, Salesforce and T-Mobile in the syndicate, was sold as financing the next AI substrate — a platform on which generalist physical intelligence would eventually run. Apptronik raised on a similar pitch. Tesla, valued partly on Elon Musk's claim that Optimus will hit 50,000 to 100,000 units in 2026, has shipped none externally. Tracxn data show $2.37bn flowed into humanoid-focused startups in the first quarter of 2026 alone, up 288% on the same period last year — almost all of it priced as call options on a market that does not yet exist.

In China, the same year produced an industrial book. Unitree's prospectus, filed with Shanghai's STAR Market in March, recorded RMB 1.71bn ($235m) in 2025 revenue, up 335% on 2024, with gross margins approaching 60% and adjusted net income of RMB 600m. UBTECH, listed in Hong Kong since late 2023, did RMB 2bn in revenue and shipped 1,079 full-size industrial humanoids — at an average ticket of about $105,000 — into BYD, FAW and other automakers. Their valuations look nothing like Figure's. Unitree is targeting a $3bn–$7bn band on listing; UBTECH's market cap sits around $7bn; AI2 Robotics, the unlisted Chinese upstart, recently marked at $2.93bn after claiming a foreign manufacturer chose its robots over Figure's for factory work.