China's Humanoid Robotics Push, Explained

More companies, more deployments, and a state-backed research platform — China's approach to humanoid robots looks different from the West's for a reason.

Of the roughly 60 platforms tracked on this site, a full 25 are Chinese — by far the largest single-country share, and that's before counting the dozens more that didn't make the cut. Understanding why requires looking past any single company.

Volume over singular flagship bets

Where the US humanoid race is dominated by a handful of very well-funded companies (Tesla, Figure, Apptronik, Agility), China's field is broad and crowded: Unitree, UBTECH, AgiBot, Fourier, Galbot, Kepler, and dozens of smaller entrants are all shipping real hardware simultaneously, at wildly different price points and specialization levels.

Chinese startups reportedly accounted for around 65% of global humanoid funding deal volume in 2025 — more individual rounds than the rest of the world combined, even though US rounds tend to be larger individually.

State involvement is more direct

X-Humanoid, the Beijing-backed innovation center behind the Tiangong platform, is a genuinely different organizational model from a venture-backed startup — it functions partly as a national reference platform meant to lift the whole domestic ecosystem, not just one company's product line.

That kind of direct industrial-policy involvement is largely absent from the American and European approaches, where government support tends to arrive as research grants or defense contracts rather than a shared reference platform.

The public-market angle

UBTECH's December 2023 Hong Kong listing made it the most direct pure-play humanoid stock on a major exchange well before most Western competitors even discussed going public. Unitree has reportedly filed for its own roughly $618 million Shanghai STAR Market IPO — a milestone that would put two of the industry's most-watched Chinese names on public markets before Figure, Apptronik, or Sanctuary AI.