Unitree shipped 5,511 humanoid robots in 2025 at an average price of less than $25,000 each, with 43% of those sales going outside China, according to the financial disclosure the company filed ahead of its Chinese stock market IPO in about two weeks. More than half of last year's revenue came from delivering robots to real customers, not lab pilots — a distinction that separates Unitree from nearly every other humanoid maker in the market. The company also turned its first profit in 2025.
The headline product is the Unitree G1, a 4-foot-tall, 40-kilogram humanoid priced at $13,500 on Unitree's website before tariffs and shipping. US distributors list it closer to $19,000, and the education-grade U5 variant with dextrous hands and modification rights sells for $66,000. The lighter, faster R1 comes in at roughly one-third the base price of the G1, part of Unitree's push to drive humanoid hardware toward commodity pricing.
The G1's cultural moment arrived through social media rather than industrial deployments. Bartosz Idzik and Radosław Grzelaczyk bought one in Poland six months ago, named it Edward Warchocki, and wired it to a large language model so it could hold live Polish conversations. Edward now has more than 1 million followers and 4 billion views across social media after clips of it wading in lakes, chasing wild boars in Warsaw with a Rolex, and getting jokingly arrested by police went viral.
“Not super intelligent, but very emotional, very easy to make friends with”— Bartosz Idzik, MERA Robotics co-founder
Key facts
- 01Unitree shipped 5,511 humanoid robots in 2025 at an average price under $25,000, with 43% of sales outside China.
- 02The basic G1 lists at $13,500 on Unitree's site; US distributors price it near $19,000, and the education-grade U5 hits $66,000.
- 03More than half of Unitree's 2025 revenue came from delivering humanoids to real customers, and the company turned its first profit.
- 04The FCC announced a July 2026 ban on new Chinese-made humanoid robots, though pre-approved models like the G1 and R1 remain in limbo.
- 05Operators charge $800–$1,200 per hour to bring a G1 to nightclubs, corporate events, and World Cup parties.
Idzik and Grzelaczyk have since built MERA Robotics into a fleet of 20 humanoids, most of them G1s, with additional units operating as separate influencer personalities in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. The same hardware is behind Rizzbot in Austin, Bart Robot dancing with Knicks fans in New York, and the Brickell Clanker cycling through jerseys at World Cup after-parties in Miami. G1s have appeared on America's Got Talent, streamed with Kai Cenat, been ordained as monks in Japan and Korea, and prayed at a mosque in Dubai.
Jake Cooperstein, a 24-year-old in Miami, bought his G1 in January after visiting a New York robotics warehouse. He opted for the $66,000 U5 because the base model prohibits modification, then named the robot the Brickell Clanker and started renting it out at $800 to $1,200 per hour for nightclubs, influencer parties, and corporate events. He recently added a Unitree R1, which he calls the Lil Clanker.
The commercial demand is real, but the demos oversell the autonomy. Both Idzik and Cooperstein say they teleoperate the robots most of the time when they're out in public — not because the G1 can't walk on its own, but because a malfunction near a crowd creates a liability they aren't willing to underwrite. The G1 ships with roughly 20 gestures and 15 dance moves built in, and programming new movements requires meaningful technical work. Cooperstein hand-taught the Brickell Clanker the Viking Row gesture popular with Norwegian soccer fans this year.
That gap between the marketing and the underlying capability is where humanoid skeptics have parked for the last two years. The G1 is charming, cheap by robotics standards, and physically capable enough for choreographed public appearances. It is not yet reliably doing warehouse picking, assembly-line work, or unsupervised housework — the jobs that would justify the trillion-dollar humanoid market projections thrown around by Nvidia, Tesla, and Figure.
Regulation is the other overhang. In July 2026, the US Federal Communications Commission announced a ban on new Chinese-made humanoid robots. Pre-approved models like the G1 and R1 are theoretically still allowed to be sold in the US, but the next generation of Unitree hardware will be locked out of the American market. Unitree did not respond to a request for comment. Europe remains open — Idzik's Polish fleet faces no equivalent restriction — and Unitree's disclosure shows the company's export base is already diversified well beyond the US.
The AI Chat Daily read: Unitree is running the same play Chinese EV makers ran a decade ago — ship a real product at a price point Western competitors can't match, iterate in public, and let volume compound. 5,511 units at sub-$25,000 pricing is not a lab curiosity; it is the first humanoid company with a genuine commercial shipping business. The FCC ban walls off the US market for the next generation, which will slow Unitree's American footprint but does not touch Europe, the Middle East, or Southeast Asia, where MERA Robotics and its imitators are already scaling. The bottleneck for the entire category is now software, not hardware — until a G1-class robot can be trusted to walk unsupervised through a crowd or complete a two-hour task without a human at the controls, the addressable market stays capped at influencer gigs and event rentals. Whoever solves the autonomy layer on top of cheap Chinese hardware captures the real prize.
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