The long-awaited initial public offering of Unitree Robotics, which values the Hangzhou-based firm at 60.99 billion yuan (US$9 billion), is set to serve as a valuation benchmark for China’s booming embodied-AI sector, buoyed by retail investor excitement and high-profile AI backers like DeepSeek.Widely billed as “mainland China’s first humanoid stock”, Unitree has priced its IPO on Shanghai’s Star Market at 150.8 yuan per share, according to a filing released Thursday evening. The firm will sell 40.45 million new shares to raise 6.1 billion yuan – above its initial 4.2 billion yuan target.Backers including AI unicorn DeepSeek and tech giant Tencent Holdings joined the strategic placement, alongside state-backed giants China National Petroleum Corp, China Southern Power Grid, China Telecom, Citic Securities and the National Council for Social Security Fund.DeepSeek, which invested 141 million yuan bound by a three-year lock-up period, agreed to co-develop AI models and embodied-intelligence technology with Unitree. The two firms would also give each other priority access in areas such as robot procurement and AI model services, Unitree said.A valuation ‘ceiling’Unitree’s IPO would serve as a valuation anchor – and effectively the ceiling – for other companies in the embodied-intelligence space, said Zheng Hualiang, founder of Leap VC, a Hangzhou-based venture capital firm investing in AI hardware and foundational models.