Unitree Technology’s debut on Shanghai’s STAR Market on Aug. 19 turned its employee equity program into a multibillion-yuan paper windfall, with company filings showing that engineers, software specialists and sales leaders held indirect stakes worth hundreds of millions of yuan at the stock’s first-day peak.
The robotics company opened at 1,100 yuan, up 629% from its 150.80-yuan IPO price, according to STAR Market trading data. Its valuation briefly reached 444.9 billion yuan during the session before ending the day with a market value of about 358.0 billion yuan. One retail allocation lot carried an unrealized gain of roughly 470,000 yuan at the intraday price cited in the offering materials.
The sharp opening also lifted the estimated paper wealth of founder Wang to 133.5 billion yuan, based on the company’s first-day valuation. Yet the more revealing feature of Unitree’s listing is the breadth of its employee ownership structure, which extends well beyond senior executives and covers dozens of technical staff through layered limited partnerships and strategic-placement plans.
Employee partnership holds 10.94% of Unitree
Unitree’s IPO prospectus identifies Shanghai Yuyi, an employee equity-incentive vehicle, as the holder of 10.94% of the company. Employees hold interests in the limited partnership rather than receiving Unitree shares directly.
The arrangement uses two further partnerships, Hangzhou Yixin and Hangzhou Yiyi, beneath Shanghai Yuyi. The structure allows the company to distribute economic interests among a larger group while keeping each individual limited partnership within China’s 50-partner ceiling.
Among the employees listed near the upper level of the structure, Yang, born in 1991 and identified as Unitree’s head of mechanical structure, held an indirect interest equivalent to about 1.7837 million shares. At the first-day intraday peak price used in the company’s disclosures, that stake represented paper wealth of approximately 1.58 billion yuan.
Chen, born in 1990 and responsible for sales and service, held the equivalent of about 946,400 shares, worth around 840 million yuan at the same price reference. Zhang, born in 1993 and responsible for algorithms and software, held roughly 546,000 shares, which translated to about 480 million yuan.
Those figures reflect market pricing during a highly volatile first trading session rather than cash that employees can immediately realize. The company’s prospectus states that interests held through the Shanghai Yuyi platform are subject to a 36-month restriction.
Technical staff received stakes worth tens of millions
The two lower-tier partnerships contain a much wider group of Unitree personnel, according to the prospectus. More than 60 front-line research-and-development managers and core technical employees received allocations generally ranging from about 0.01% to 0.05% of the company.
Using Unitree’s first-day closing market value of 358.0 billion yuan, the prospectus-based calculations put the paper value of those individual holdings between roughly 35 million yuan and 170 million yuan.
That distribution gives the listing a different profile from a conventional founder-led IPO, where most of the immediate gains are concentrated among executives and early financial backers. Unitree’s structure places meaningful equity exposure among employees working on mechanical design, algorithms, software, product development and commercial support—functions central to a company whose valuation rests heavily on expectations for robotics technology and future production scale.
The earliest options were issued under far less favorable circumstances. Unitree’s prospectus says the company signed its first batch of option agreements with 17 early core employees in September 2017, during a period when it was unable to meet payroll. The options carried a strike price of 1 yuan per unit of registered capital.
At the 150.80-yuan IPO price, that strike implied a gain of more than 150 times. At the 1,100-yuan opening price, the increase exceeded 1,000 times. Later incentive rounds were consolidated under Shanghai Yuyi for administration.
The prospectus also records attrition within the scheme: nine employees who had received grants left Unitree before the prospectus signing date, and their incentive allocations were canceled.
Strategic-placement plans widened participation
Separate from Shanghai Yuyi, Unitree established two employee-focused asset-management plans for the IPO’s strategic placement. Together, the plans covered 171 executives and core employees and subscribed a combined 272 million yuan, according to the prospectus.
Plan No. 1 included 161 participants, primarily front-line R&D engineers. Individual subscriptions ranged from 1 million yuan to 4 million yuan, and the related shares carry a 12-month lock-up.
Plan No. 2 covered 10 participants and has a 36-month lock-up. Wang subscribed 15 million yuan, the largest amount in that plan. Yang, Zhang and another R&D leader, Wu, each subscribed 9 million yuan, the filing shows.
Unitree reported 516 employees at the end of 2025. On that basis, the 171 people participating through the strategic-placement plans represented about one-third of the workforce, although some may also have held interests through the broader equity-incentive structure.
The company has reserved an upper-level partnership interest in Shanghai Yuyi for future employee incentives, excluding Wang as a recipient. Unitree’s prospectus says that during the two natural years after the company has been listed for 36 months, no less than 50% of the reserved grant ratio is intended to be awarded, with vesting tied to annual performance assessments.
The restrictions mean the eventual value of these awards will depend on Unitree’s market performance long after its dramatic debut. The 629% opening premium has created unusually large paper gains, but employees with locked shares and partnership interests will face the same exposure as other holders if the stock trades below its IPO price or retreats from its first-day levels.
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