AgiBot kicks off Hong Kong IPO as top humanoid maker by shipments
Shanghai humanoid maker AgiBot has formally begun its Hong Kong listing process, backed by world-leading 2025 shipments and a valuation target near US$6 billion.
AgiBot (Zhiyuan Robotics), the Shanghai-based humanoid robot maker co-founded by former Huawei "genius youth" Peng Zhihui, has formally started its Hong Kong listing process, according to a report by IT Home on Thursday. The company shipped more humanoid robots than any competitor worldwide in 2025 — 5,168 units by analyst firm Omdia's count — and rolled its 10,000th robot off the line in March 2026.
From denials to filing
The move ends a year of will-they-won't-they. AgiBot denied Hong Kong IPO reports twice in 2025, even stating it had no backdoor-listing plans within 36 months after taking control of A-share company Swancor Advanced Materials for 2.1 billion yuan. Earlier Reuters reporting said the company had mandated CICC, CITIC Securities, and Morgan Stanley, targeting a valuation of HK$40–50 billion (US$5.1–6.4 billion), a 15–25 percent float that could raise over US$1 billion, and a listing as soon as the third quarter of 2026 — a timeline the newly confirmed process start now makes plausible.
The embodied-AI capital wave
Founded in February 2023 by Peng and former Huawei vice president Deng Taihua, AgiBot counts Tencent, JD.com, SAIC, LG Electronics, and Mirae Asset among its backers, and gained political visibility when President Xi Jinping inspected its robots in Shanghai. A successful listing would make it only the second humanoid-focused company on the Hong Kong exchange after UBTech, and the first of the new generation of embodied-AI unicorns — a cohort that includes Unitree, which is pursuing its own listing — to reach public markets.
Why it matters
Humanoid robotics has absorbed enormous private capital on thin revenue, and AgiBot's IPO will be the first real price discovery for the sector's frontrunner: a company claiming both global shipment leadership and roughly 4 billion yuan in expected 2026 revenue. How public investors value that story will calibrate funding conditions for every embodied-AI startup in China — and signal whether the humanoid boom can graduate from government showcases to a durable business.