TechFlowPost’s elsewhere project has published an online exhibit on the funding history of Unitree Robotics, using old WeChat chats, investment memos, photos and videos from some of the company’s backers to reconstruct its long path from an unfashionable robotics startup to a company broadly accepted by primary-market investors.
According to the exhibit, Wang Xingxing received a RMB 2 million investment in 2018 from Variables Capital, a fund under GeekPark. The material describes it as Unitree’s first institutional financing and the second investment after Yin Fangming.
At the time, Wang did not fit the founder profile many venture investors were used to seeing. He was not a PhD from a top school, had no overseas background and no senior operating role at a major tech company. The company’s focus, quadruped robots, was also seen as a niche direction with no obvious market. When fundraising was running dry, Wang at one point paid salaries out of his own pocket.
Until Unitree’s robot dog appeared on the Year of the Ox Spring Festival Gala in 2021 and the Go1 price was brought down to RMB 16,000, fundraising remained difficult. The B2 round before the 2024 Lunar New Year changed that, with Meituan, Jinshi Investment and Source Code Capital joining in. By then, the question around Unitree had shifted from what robot dogs were good for to who could still get allocation in the company.
How Sequoia first found Wang
In July 2019, Li Yannan, then an analyst at Sequoia China Seed Fund, heard about Unitree from a senior schoolmate at Zhejiang University. Unitree’s website listed only a QQ email address. Li used that email to trace Wang’s WeChat account and sent a friend request. Three days later, he made his first visit.
Li still has footage on his phone from July 21, 2019, when Wang demonstrated AlienGo during that first meeting.
A robot dog in a suitcase, then an overnight sleeper to Beijing
One month later, Cao Xi, then a partner at Sequoia China Seed Fund, and Li brought Unitree to the investment committee. Before the meeting, Wang proposed bringing an A1 robot dog to Beijing for a live demonstration, saying it could fit inside a 20-inch suitcase.
The robot dog’s battery exceeded transport limits, which meant it could not go by plane or high-speed rail. Wang instead took a sleeper train from Hangzhou to Beijing that lasted more than 10 hours. After the demo, he took another sleeper back.
Before attending Sequoia’s investment committee meeting, Wang asked Li: 「方便带个狗子过去吗？」
Li later found that Wang was consistently eager to show the product whenever there was a chance. For several years, Wang would proactively ask to bring robot dogs to Sequoia’s CEO summit and LP conference. One year, there was no booth on site, so he waited outside the venue with the machine.
An 8-point score inside Sequoia
When Sequoia partners scored Unitree, Cao, who was then still working on the seed side, gave it an 8, the highest score among the group. As described earlier by Sequoia’s Gongyuan on a video podcast cited in the exhibit, an 8 means “must invest.”
One memo also included a short line: 「很喜欢这个人」.
How one VC described Wang Xingxing
In one internal VC assessment, the founder section described Wang this way: 「严重偏科，13岁就自己学习代码和研究机械，大学开发出第一台机器人，应该算不是科班出身里的典型outlier。暂时没有发现特别的不足，和人交流上还是会有一些自己坚持的沟通方式，但也不一定是坏事，总体影响不大。」
The exhibit also includes Wang’s master’s thesis.
What Unitree looked like in early 2020
Materials prepared for Chuxin Capital’s investment committee in March 2020 show a much smaller company: 18 employees in total, with 70% in technical roles; full-year 2019 revenue of RMB 11.8282 million; a net margin of 26.5%; and R&D spending equal to 41% of revenue.
The customer list was split into two groups. There were 30 domestic customers, most of them laboratories at universities and research institutes. There were also 12 overseas customers, including Google, Nvidia, Apple and Android creator Andy Rubin.
At the time, comparable products from Boston Dynamics were still being rented out at close to $10,000 per month, while Unitree’s Laikago sold for RMB 20,000 to RMB 30,000. After comparing major competing products, Chuxin Capital concluded that Unitree’s strengths were strong locomotion performance, the highest degree of whole-machine integration, the lowest cost, and clear product positioning with a defined target customer base.
A 12-question hiring test for everyone
According to the exhibit, Wang had his own way of evaluating people. In the early hiring period, every applicant had to complete a written 12-question test, including front-desk candidates. Beyond job-related ability, some questions ranged much wider, such as: 「最近的几百年，人类显著的科技进步都诞生于西方，你认为是什么原因导致的？」 and 「你怎么看待和评价中医？」
The materials also include a picture-based “spot the differences” test.
Unitree’s funding stages
The exhibit divides Unitree’s financing history into several phases.
- At the founding stage, the company first received a RMB 2 million seed investment from Yin Fangming, then brought in angel funding from Variables Capital, Anchuang Technology and Binhe Investment, mainly to support quadruped robot prototype development and productization.
- After 2019, Sequoia China, Vertex Ventures, Shunwei Capital, Chuxin Capital and Matrix Partners China joined in one after another, as Unitree moved from technical validation toward commercial expansion.
- After 2024, growth-stage investors saw both evolution and continuity in the company.
Investor notes from 2023 and 2024
In mid-2024, Guanghe Venture Capital found an investment opportunity to enter at a RMB 3.5 billion valuation. That figure appeared in an investment memo written in the phone notes app of partner Zhu Jia.
A record left by Source Code Capital at the end of 2023 described Unitree’s rooftop training ground. Robot dogs had to climb the stairs from the office every day. After enough climbs and falls, the edges of the stair steps had been chipped away. Debris was cleaned up, but the stairs were not specially renovated. They were simply swept and used again. The note read: 「从这个细节里看到的，是一支仍将主要精力投入产品测试和研发迭代的团队。」
Huang Yungang, managing partner at Source Code Rhythm, said: 「兴兴是个极度克制的创业者，不盲目投入，即便后来宇树火了，有了更多资源后，在战略上也是尽可能的先把硬件和小脑做好。」
Jinqiu Fund tracked Unitree from 2020 to 2025. Its view was that what really stood out was Unitree’s position as the de facto market-share leader. 「80%的paper都是基于宇树本体发的，非常大的生态优势。」 It also made a separate technical judgment that reinforcement learning-based motion control had introduced a key variable.
At one closed-door session held by Jinqiu Fund, Wang also spoke about the meaning behind the name Unitree and said he liked watching anime in his spare time.
Photos that stayed in investors’ albums
In November 2021, Matrix Partners China managing partner Wang Huadong ordered a Go1 himself while conducting due diligence on Unitree. He said: 「我可能是国内最早的几个买 Go1 的个人消费者。」 After it arrived, his children curiously played with the robot dog.
In the second half of 2018, when Unitree officially started shipping Laikago, it had already sold hundreds of units overseas. Later, when Vertex Ventures helped connect Unitree with overseas clients, Wang introduced the specific parts of the G1 “Iron Armor Boxing King” to the group.
Guanghe Venture Capital partner Zhu Jia kept an R1 in the office. From pre-order to delivery, the wait lasted nearly half a year. On the delivery day, the two shook hands.
On April 16, 2025, G1 and Snow King greeted guests together at the Meituan Longzhu investor annual meeting. The exhibit says Unitree and Mixue were representative projects for Longzhu in technology and consumer sectors, and investors found it amusing to see them side by side, which led to the photo.
Monolith founding partner Cao Xi placed two Unitree products outside offices in Shanghai and Beijing: a front-desk G1 dressed in Monolith workwear with a bow tie, and a robotic bull called “Niubenben.” The exhibit says “Niubenben” was a commemorative gift from Wang to Cao after Unitree’s robot dog first appeared on the Spring Festival Gala in 2021.
It also notes that “Niubenben” was modified from the A1, the same model as the “dog” that had once been packed into a suitcase and taken by sleeper train to Beijing for the 2019 demonstration.
