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Yin Fangming's first outside check in 2016 seeded Unitree, the quadruped robotics startup that just listed in Shanghai. He's now chairman of rival Galbot.
In 2016, a small quadruped-robotics lab out of Shanghai University got its first outside check: 2 million yuan (~$300,000 at the time) for roughly 15% of the company. No institutional investor would write it. The angel was Yin Fangming, then fresh off a $100 million Series A at his own AI-robotics startup. Ten years and roughly 140x later, that bet, Unitree, priced its Aug. 19, 2026 A-share listing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, with Yin's realized return from his original principal near 280 million yuan (~$39 million). The same week, his second top-tier embodied-AI bet surfaced: Yin has taken the chairmanship at 银河通用 (Galbot), a humanoid and embodied-AI company that has emerged as one of Unitree's main domestic rivals.
Wang Xingxing was a graduate student at Shanghai University in 2016, building small electric quadrupeds for a market that barely existed. Yin, who had spent two years at his own AI-robotics startup ROOBO, wrote the lab's first outside check for 2 million yuan in exchange for roughly 15% of the company, according to a qbitai feature on the investor. At the time, ROOBO had just closed what was then the largest Series A in domestic AI: a $100 million round in 2016. Yin had the cash and the conviction; the rest of the market did not.
Unitree's listing notice, filed Aug. 18, 2026, confirmed the IPO date and the share structure underpinning the A-share debut. The Shanghai Stock Exchange release and the English translation of the prospectus lay out the numbers: a vertically integrated maker of quadrupeds, humanoids, and core components, with a reported self-research rate above 95% on motors, reducers, and controllers. That vertical-integration thesis, in 2016, was almost impossible to underwrite without hardware experience.
ROOBO, founded in 2014, raised a record $100 million domestic AI Series A in 2016 on the back of consumer products like the Pudding robot and a stake in the Domgy robotic pet dog. By 2018, the company had pivoted toward children's education; Yin stepped down in October 2020, and ROOBO contracted. The four failed tooling rounds on Pudding, the bills a hardware startup pays for injection molds, assembly jigs, and yield ramps, were the lesson. Most angel investors do not have a working relationship with mold shops in Shenzhen. Yin did. That operator edge, the qbitai profile notes, is what lets him underwrite a 95% self-research rate when peers will only write checks into software-light wrappers around off-the-shelf motors.
Yin's 140x figure is not on the position as originally held. After trimming from 15.0% to 11.4% in 2018, a 1.31 million yuan (~$185,000) realization, he transferred his remaining direct stake in 2020 into Junwan Hongyi, the LP vehicle through which he holds roughly a 16.6% stake, for a token 14,300 yuan (~$2,000). In May 2025, Junwan Hongyi sold 22.6% of Unitree to a pre-IPO investor for 58 million yuan (~$8.1 million), with Yin's share landing near 9.64 million yuan (~$1.3 million). At the Aug. 19, 2026 A-share listing, the cumulative realized return across those moves lands near 280 million yuan, the figure qbitai cites as the 140x multiple on his original 2 million yuan principal.
If Yin had held the original 15% position through the listing, the implied value would have been near 1.848 billion yuan (~$258 million) at the IPO pricing, per the prospectus translation. His realized 280 million yuan is roughly an eighth of that. The rotation was not a mistake. Early liquidity at hardware-startup scale is rare, and his later bets, into energy startup 宇箭动力 (1.5 million yuan, or about $210,000, for 3.9%, third-largest shareholder, 2021), solid-state battery maker 重庆太蓝新能源 via 远辰科耀 (2023, then a 400 million yuan, or about $56 million, B+ in December 2025), and small-sat launcher 深圳先登航天 (2025), used the cash. But the multiple on the held position is the figure the 841.5x aggregator reports track: that ratio, on a current 2.76% stake, is an LP-level artifact, not a counter-claim against the 140x on his own angel principal. Aggregator pieces at odaily.news and kucoin.com cite the higher figure; the qbitai feature walks the realized chain that produces the 140x.
Yin has taken the chairmanship at Galbot, a humanoid and embodied-AI company that has emerged as one of Unitree's main domestic rivals, according to the qbitai feature. The qbitai profile documents the chairmanship but does not give a basis to call Galbot "the next Unitree." The chairmanship itself signals that the operator who can underwrite vertical integration is doubling down on the same stack, with the same board-level skin in the game. Hardware-cost discipline and a vertical-integration thesis is the pattern that underwrote Unitree. The next data point is whether Galbot reaches its own listing window before the cycle's liquidity window closes.