Humanoids Summit
Humanoids Summit
World Technology Forum — Humanoids Summit
Unitree's Shanghai listing gave humanoid robotics its first market-set valuation — $9 billion, a fraction of Figure AI's private $39 billion mark, even though Unitree ships more robots than every rival combined. The Humanoids Summit convenes the makers, chipmakers, component suppliers and capital now racing to turn 13,000 units shipped in 2025 into Goldman Sachs' forecast 1.4 million by 2035.
$38B
Goldman Sachs' 2035 humanoid market forecast — revised 6x upward in Jan 2025
30
Companies, platforms and institutions in the directory
11
Countries represented at headquarters level
13,000
Humanoid units actually shipped worldwide, 2025
Few technology forecasts spread as wide as humanoid robotics. The gap between what shipped last year and what banks project for 2050 is precisely what makes this a Summit topic rather than a settled market.
Goldman revised this figure 6x upward from a prior $6B estimate in January 2025, citing AI breakthroughs and a 40% drop in manufacturing costs, and projects 1.4 million units shipped annually by 2035. Longer-horizon 2050 scenarios run far higher and far wider apart — Morgan Stanley at $5 trillion (including supply chain and services, on roughly 1 billion robots in use), Citi at $7 trillion, UBS at $1.4–1.7 trillion. The industry's actual disclosed revenue in 2025 was under $1 billion, which is the honest scale to hold those numbers against.
Paid commercial pilots are real: Figure at BMW Spartanburg, Apptronik with Mercedes-Benz and GXO, UBTECH on BYD and NIO lines.
NVIDIA's Jetson Thor and Project GR00T, Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics, and OpenAI's backing of Figure and 1X are turning frontier models into physical control.
China ships cheap robots at scale; American labs carry venture-scale valuations. Unitree's IPO is the first data point resolving which story the public markets believe.
Harmonic reducers, actuators and sensors — supplied by firms like Harmonic Drive and Leaderdrive — are where the path to a sub-$20,000 humanoid actually gets built.
Unitree priced its Shanghai STAR Market IPO on August 6, 2026, issuing roughly 40.4 million shares to raise about $904 million at a valuation near $9.04 billion — above the ~$6.2 billion base the deal had been guided at, and the first regulator-approved, publicly traded price tag anywhere in humanoid robotics. The number is smaller than most of the private hype surrounding the sector: Figure AI, still private, carries a $39 billion valuation after an OpenAI-led round, and 1X Technologies sits near $10 billion. Yet Unitree is the industry's volume leader by a wide margin, having shipped more than 5,500 units in 2025 — more than every other humanoid maker combined — even as its Q1 2026 net profit fell 52% year on year on pricing pressure. The gap between the cheap robot shipping today and the expensive robot still raising money is, for now, the whole industry in miniature.
Thirty companies, chipmakers, component suppliers and capital providers spanning the industry from actuator to assembly line. Filter by category, or search by name.
Valuation, shipment and funding figures reflect the most recently reported financing rounds, regulatory filings or credible 2025–2026 industry estimates, compiled from public filings, press releases and trade coverage including Goldman Sachs Research, Omdia, Counterpoint Research, and company investor communications. Private-company valuations move quickly and shipment figures are frequently self-reported and disputed between rival manufacturers (noted where relevant). Compiled for Summit convening purposes as of September 2026 and not intended as investment research.
Four threads run through the Humanoids Summit programme, each mapped to the institutions in the directory above.
The US venture-funded labs and the Chinese volume manufacturers, each betting on a different path from prototype to fleet.
The foundation-model layer — NVIDIA, Google DeepMind and OpenAI — increasingly matters as much as the hardware itself.
Harmonic reducers, actuators and sensors, and the manufacturers turning a $90,000 pilot unit into a sub-$20,000 product.
Strategic investors, sovereign-adjacent capital, and the first wave of humanoid companies now facing public-market scrutiny.