Unitree Technology made its debut on Shanghai’s STAR Market on Aug. 19, opening 629% higher at RMB 1,100. Its market capitalization briefly climbed to RMB 444.9 billion. According to the report, a retail investor winning one lot in the IPO was sitting on a paper gain of RMB 470,000.
Much of the public discussion around the listing focused on the wealth created for founders and investors. The report said founder Wang Xingxing’s fortune reached RMB 133.5 billion, making him the new richest person born in the 1990s. Xiaomi founder Lei Jun’s Shunwei Capital booked a paper gain of RMB 15.2 billion from its earlier investment. Meituan-affiliated entities, described as the company’s largest outside shareholder, were up more than RMB 33.3 billion. DeepSeek and High-Flyer, both linked in the report to Liang Wenfeng, also earned RMB 1.1 billion from the IPO subscription.
TechFlow’s piece argued that the more relevant story for ordinary employees sits elsewhere in the prospectus, inside a company called Shanghai Yuyi. Even though its name does not include Unitree, the entity serves as Unitree’s employee equity incentive platform and holds 10.94% of the company. The batch of options granted in 2017, when Unitree was unable to pay wages, was placed there.
At first-day market prices, the largest paper fortune among the holders of those options reached RMB 1.58 billion, the report said.
A three-layer structure behind employee ownership
The prospectus shows that Shanghai Yuyi is a limited partnership. Employees do not directly hold Unitree shares. Instead, they own interests in the partnership and hold their stake in the listed company indirectly through it.
The partner list includes several nested holding platforms and dozens of individual employees. The first three names on that list are all people born in the 1990s:
- Yang Zhiyu, head of mechanical structure, born in 1991 and a Zhejiang University graduate in mechanical engineering and automation, joined Unitree in 2016 when the company was just founded. He indirectly holds about 1.7837 million shares. Based on the first-day peak price, his paper fortune stood at RMB 1.58 billion.
- Chen Li, head of the sales and service system, born in 1990, holds about 946,400 shares, worth RMB 840 million on paper.
- Zhang Yangguang, head of algorithms and software, born in 1993 and a Nankai University automation graduate, led development of the function that generates motion programs directly from video in the robot yangko performance “Yang BOT,” which became widely known after the 2025 CCTV Spring Festival Gala. He holds about 546,000 shares, worth RMB 480 million on paper.
Shanghai Yuyi itself has only six direct partners: Wang Xingxing, Chen Li, Yang Zhiyu, one executive partner, and two limited partnerships named Hangzhou Yixin and Hangzhou Yiyi.
The report said most employees do not appear at that first level because a limited partnership can have no more than 50 partners. To handle a larger group, Unitree added Hangzhou Yixin and Hangzhou Yiyi as additional equity platforms, creating a three-tier setup of “Shanghai Yuyi - Yixin and Yiyi - employees.”
That is where the broader base of ordinary workers shows up. More than 60 frontline R&D managers and core technical employees received stakes ranging from 0.01% to 0.05% through those platforms. Based on Unitree’s first-day closing market value of RMB 358 billion, their paper fortunes ranged from about RMB 35 million to RMB 170 million.
The RMB 1 options date back to a cash crunch in 2017
The story goes back to 2017, Unitree’s second year, when the company had burned through its funding and could not pay wages.
The report said Tian Jiangchuan of Chuxin Capital met Wang Xingxing in November that year and spoke with him at length but chose not to invest. In an internal investment note, he wrote four characters that the article rendered as “grassroots background.” Three years later, Chuxin Capital invested at four times the earlier valuation. Tian later attributed his initial decision to what he called “the arrogance of elitism.”
Before outside capital arrived, Wang stopped taking his own salary and used his own money to pay employees. In September that year, the company signed its first option agreements with 17 early core employees including Yang Zhiyu, at an exercise price of RMB 1 per unit of registered capital. Over the following years, Unitree rolled out several more rounds of equity incentives, all of which were eventually consolidated under the Shanghai Yuyi platform.
The three post-90s employees listed at the front of the roster, along with the more than 100 people behind them, entered the incentive system through that process. Based on the IPO price of RMB 150.80, the gain on those options exceeded 150x. Based on the opening price of RMB 1,100 on the first trading day, it exceeded 1,000x.
The report also cited Li Yannan of Sequoia China, who said Wang’s current core management team is the same group that was there at the start and that not a single one has left.
171 employees joined strategic placement plans
The employee upside did not come only from the earliest option grants. Unitree also set up two dedicated employee asset-management plans, with 171 executives and key employees participating for a total subscription amount of RMB 272 million.
Plan No. 1 included 161 participants, mainly frontline R&D engineers, each subscribing between RMB 1 million and RMB 4 million. Plan No. 2 had only 10 participants and came with a 36-month lock-up. Wang Xingxing subscribed RMB 15 million, the largest amount in the group. Zhang Yangguang, Yang Zhiyu, and another R&D head, Wu Jinze, each subscribed RMB 9 million.
As of the end of 2025, Unitree had 516 employees in total. By the report’s math, roughly one in every three employees had put money into the company through the listing process.
More incentives remain to be granted after the IPO
The Shanghai Yuyi story does not end with the listing. According to the report, the upper-layer partnership interests in Shanghai Yuyi held by Wang will all be used for future employee equity incentives, and Wang himself will not be among the beneficiaries. In the two natural years after the company completes 36 months as a listed firm, no less than 50% of that pool is to be granted.
The report highlighted another detail in the affiliated entities set up for employee incentives: 99.68% of Hangzhou Yixin is currently held by Wang Xingxing and has not yet been distributed to others. In the article’s description, that nearly empty vehicle is effectively reserved for future grants.
Still, the wealth on paper may take time to turn into cash. Shares held through the Shanghai Yuyi platform are subject to a 36-month lock-up, and later grants are tied to annual performance reviews. If performance targets are not met, the related incentive interests may fail to vest. Before the prospectus signing date, nine employees who had received grants had already left the company, and their incentive interests were canceled.
The RMB 272 million subscribed through the strategic placement plans is also locked up. Plan No. 1 has a 12-month lock-up, while Plan No. 2 is locked for 36 months. If the stock trades below the IPO price during that period, those positions would show paper losses.
The report said no one can guarantee what price the market will be willing to pay for Unitree in the months and years after listing. For employees, the next question is not just whether they have paper gains today, but when to realize them, whether they can hold on until then, and how that realization will happen.
Back in the autumn of 2017, when Unitree could not pay wages, some young employees chose to stay and tied themselves to the company at RMB 1 per share. By the day of the IPO, that bet had turned into paper returns of more than 150x. That is the part of Unitree’s listing story that sits closest to the experience of ordinary salaried workers.
