Unitree Technology and Sequoia China Establish Shanyu·Innovation Program, Entering Early-Stage Investment in Embodied Intelligence

Seven years ago, Wang Xingxing carried a robot dog onto a green-skinned slow train to Beijing to raise funds.

Seven years later, with his net worth soaring, he has begun working with the investors from back then to find the next entrepreneurial genius.

Wang Xingxing suddenly enters the investment world—Unitree knows all too well how to incubate

Wang Xingxing has started making investments!

On October 28, Unitree Technology, which had just gone public more than two months earlier, announced that it had jointly established the "Shanyu·Venture Program" with China's top investment institution Sequoia China, formally entering the field of early-stage embodied intelligence investment.

According to the plan announced by both parties, the "Shanyu·Venture Program" will focus on investing in embodied intelligence, robot applications, and upstream and downstream core technologies, while also covering other frontier hard-tech fields.

Both parties hope to use an "engineer + investor" combination to provide entrepreneurs with funding, technical guidance, product validation, and industry resources.

This cooperation agreement also has a rather unusual requirement: "do not add chaos."

The five investment principles officially announced are

"understand technology and industry, discover early, decide quickly, value people, and do not add chaos."

For early-stage entrepreneurs, Shanyu promises to maintain a high-trust, low-friction mode of cooperation, to be a good co-pilot, and not to grab the founder's steering wheel.

Wang Xingxing has high hopes for this cooperation.

He said that Sequoia has been one of Unitree's earliest and most important supporters since 2019. This time, both parties hope to rely on the dual perspectives of engineers and investors to help young teams find products suitable for the market more quickly.

Li Yannan, managing director of Sequoia China, said that Unitree can provide frontier robotics technology insight and engineering guidance, while Sequoia is responsible for funding support and professional post-investment services, with both parties jointly helping startups grow.

In fact, Wang Xingxing had long been preparing to enter the capital world.

In September this year, Unitree began recruiting ecosystem partners for the "Yuchuang Program," focusing on finding startup teams in areas such as robot application solutions, data and simulation platforms, core components, embodied intelligence algorithms, and global sales channels.

On October 22, at the 2026 World Physical AI Conference held in Hangzhou, Wang Xingxing revealed that the Yuchuang Program had received more than 200 projects in just over a month, and that in the next five years it hopes to incubate more than 200 high-quality ecosystem enterprises.

Previously, Unitree had already opened its robot platform, development tools, and some engineering mass-production resources to partners to help external teams carry out secondary development.

On the evening the cooperation was announced, Unitree Technology also released an important financial report.

In the first three quarters of this year, Unitree's operating revenue was 1.817 billion yuan, up 55.71% year on year; net profit attributable to shareholders was 387 million yuan, up 270.54% year on year. However, net profit in the third quarter alone was 113 million yuan, down 17.37% year on year.

More noteworthy is R&D investment. In the first three quarters, Unitree's R&D expenses reached 263 million yuan, up 191.48% year on year, mainly invested in embodied intelligence large models, computing power, and R&D team building.

Seven years ago, taking a green-skinned train to find Sequoia—the capital giant fell in love with Wang Xingxing at first sight

The story of Wang Xingxing and Sequoia begins in the summer of 2019.

At that time, Unitree Technology had just been established for three years, and quadruped robots were still a rather niche entrepreneurial direction.

Although Unitree had already produced robot dogs such as Laikago and AlienGo, there was still a long way to go before large-scale commercialization.

Speaking of how the two met, in July 2019, Li Yannan heard about Wang Xingxing through an alumnus of Zhejiang University.

Li Yannan

He found a QQ email address on Unitree's official website, obtained contact information through intermediaries, and then came to Hangzhou to visit.

At that time, Wang Xingxing did not yet have the fame he has today. The office was located at Hangzhou Jinxiu International Technology Center, and he showed investors a quadruped robot, AlienGo.

Li Yannan recalled that Unitree's robot could already compete with similar international products, had customers including universities, laboratories, and internet companies, and had begun generating revenue.

But within Sequoia, there was no consensus on this investment.

What exactly are robot dogs useful for? Would families buy them? Do factories really need them? At the time, few people could give a definite answer.

In order to attend Sequoia's investment decision meeting in Beijing, Wang Xingxing personally took the robot dog to the site.

Because the robot's battery capacity exceeded the limits for high-speed rail and air transport, he could only take a green-skinned train, spending more than ten hours transporting the equipment to Beijing.

Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily later disclosed that Unitree had at the time encountered the temporary withdrawal of an industrial fund, putting it under considerable financial pressure.

Sequoia Seed Fund ultimately decided to invest.

In December 2019, Sequoia invested its first 15 million yuan in Unitree, obtaining about 10% equity after the capital increase, corresponding to a post-investment valuation of about 150 million yuan.

After that, Sequoia continued to increase its investment in 2020, 2024, and 2025, with cumulative investment of about 102 million yuan.

What Sequoia valued was also Wang Xingxing's almost stubborn pursuit of technology.

Li Yannan once revealed that Wang Xingxing would personally revise financing terms and confidentiality agreements, and the two sides communicated back and forth for nearly two months, with the documents densely covered with his annotations.

In Sequoia's internal evaluation at the time, Wang Xingxing was called a typical "Outlier," that is, a special entrepreneur who did not fit conventional evaluation standards.

On the two indicators of personal traits and strategic vision, Sequoia gave him 9 points out of 10.

Seven years later, this investment has delivered astonishing paper returns.

On August 19, 2026, Unitree Technology officially listed on the Science and Technology Innovation Board of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, becoming the A-share "first humanoid robot stock."

On the first day of listing, Unitree's share price once reached 1,100 yuan, and its market value exceeded 440 billion yuan.

According to Unitree's pre-IPO equity disclosure, Sequoia held a total of approximately 25.8995 million shares through Ningbo Sequoia and Xiamen Yaheng, accounting for 7.11% of the total share capital before the offering, making it the market-oriented venture capital institution with the largest stake in Unitree.

Based on Unitree's first-day morning trading price of 882 yuan, Sequoia's stake was worth approximately 22.843 billion yuan, representing a paper return of more than 220 times on its cumulative investment of 102 million yuan.

With vast capital at his disposal, Wang Xingxing is playing a big game

So why is Wang Xingxing entering the investment world at this time?

One important reason is that the robotics industry is about to enter a more complex commercialization phase.

Unitree is already capable of mass-producing robots. According to the latest materials disclosed on October 28, Unitree

G1 has cumulatively rolled off the production line about 10,000 to 20,000 units since its release in May 2024. The company produces tens of thousands of robots each year and independently manufactures a large number of joint motors and modules.

Robots' mobility has improved markedly. Videos of them doing flips, dancing, running, and fighting have made Unitree a recurring hot topic on global social media.

But before they can truly enter homes, factories, and commercial service settings, robots still need to solve a large number of specific problems.

For example, for a robot to enter a factory, it needs to recognize parts of different specifications, understand complex production tasks, be able to work continuously for several hours, and remain stable when the environment changes.

Such development work involves mechanical design, vision algorithms, sensors, data training, and industry software. It is very difficult for a single robot manufacturer alone to cover all industry needs.

This also explains why Unitree hopes to incubate 200 ecosystem companies.

Unitree provides standardized robot bodies, allowing external teams to develop specialized applications for different scenarios. The more the products are used, the easier it is for developers to accumulate real data, thereby improving the robots' ability to work in complex environments.

At the same time, through investments in early-stage technology companies, Unitree can gain early access to cutting-edge technologies such as dexterous hands, tactile sensors, robot joints, and simulation data.

Innovations in these fields may all have the opportunity to enter Unitree's own product supply chain in the future.

Moreover, other Chinese companies are already exploring this path.

In 2024, AgiBot launched "Venture Capital Plan A" and subsequently invested in several embodied intelligence industry chain companies. In 2025, AgiBot also jointly established an early-stage investment platform, "Lingzhi Xinchuang," with Hillhouse.

In June this year, robotics company Galaxea and Cathay Capital announced the launch of the "Starpath Plan," which plans to invest 1 billion yuan over the next five years to support 100 early-stage embodied intelligence companies.

The robotics industry is seeing the emergence of a group of investors with industry resources. They are familiar with manufacturing processes, technical difficulties, and customer needs, and they also hope to expand their influence in the industry chain through capital cooperation.

On October 28, when Reuters analyzed Unitree's latest financial report, it noted that Chinese robotics companies are increasing investment to find sustainable commercial applications. As one of the few Chinese robotics companies that is already profitable, Unitree's performance has become an important indicator for observing the industry's prospects.

Final thoughts

Wang Xingxing said at the World Physical AI Conference on October 22 that he is "very afraid of wasting every day," because there is too much to learn and competition in the robotics industry is fierce.

In 2019, at the age of 29, he carried a robot dog and rode a slow green-skinned train for more than ten hours before arriving at the scene of Sequoia's investment decision meeting.

Seven years later, Sequoia has gone from being his investor to his partner.

The first batch of investments under the Shanyu Venture Plan has not yet been announced. After the success of that 15 million yuan investment back then, Wang Xingxing finally has the opportunity to personally decide who should receive the next early-stage funds.

This article comes from the WeChat public account "E-commerce Frontline," author: Qian You, published by 36Kr with authorization.