Dexterous Hands Ship Over 10,000 Units as InTime Robotics Leads the Embodied AI Race

In 2025, Unitree Robotics surpassed 10,000 units in shipments of its dexterous robotic hands, setting a new global industry record—far exceeding the annual sales volume of around 100 units by Shadow Robot, a long-established overseas manufacturer. Behind this milestone lies nearly a decade of patient groundwork: since 2016, the company has focused on core technologies for miniature servo cylinders, initially achieving commercialization in industrial and medical applications to fund further R&D. By 2020, it had driven down the price of domestically produced dexterous hands to under RMB 100,000. Following the surge in humanoid robotics starting in 2023, Unitree accelerated mass production. In early 2026, the company secured hundreds of millions of RMB in Series C1/C2 financing, backed jointly by “national team” investors and industrial capital, including China Mobile’s Chain Leader Fund, Beijing AI Industry Fund, and Shenzhen Capital Group. Investors highlighted the company’s “pragmatic and disciplined” strategy—prioritizing reliability over hype amid market froth—and noted its diversified technical roadmap covering linkage-driven, tendon-driven, and direct-drive approaches. Although early signs of a price war have emerged, industry consensus holds that value-driven competition has yet to take shape. The true barriers to entry lie in mass-production capability, customer-specific customization, and real-world deployment. OEMs’ in-house development efforts are unlikely to replace specialized suppliers like Unitree, which is already in multi-product-line validation phases, poised for the commercial inflection point at the 100,000-unit scale.