Chinese startup Unitree unveiled a new high-speed robot named “Superman” on Monday. The company, which is set to go public at a $9 billion valuation on Wednesday, says the robot can outrun and outjump top human athletes.
Unitree said the robot, which has been in development for just three months, can reach a top speed of 12.66 meters per second — faster than the roughly 12.4 meters per second top speed achieved by Usain Bolt during his world-record 100-meter run in 2009. While Bolt completed the distance in 9.58 seconds, Unitree’s robot would cover it in about 7.90 seconds if it maintained its top speed throughout.
According to Unitree, Superman can also jump 2 meters vertically, surpassing the human world record for the standing high jump.
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Unitree said the robot remains a work in progress and could be further improved in the coming months.
Unitree will begin trading in Shanghai on Wednesday. The debut coincides with the opening of the World Robot Conference in Beijing, adding to investor attention on a company whose humanoid robots have drawn global interest for running, dancing and performing martial arts.
The IPO was more than 8,000 times oversubscribed by retail investors, a record for Shanghai’s tech-focused STAR Market. Unitree said in a social media post last week that it had cumulatively produced and delivered about 18,000 bipedal humanoid robots across multiple models as of July.
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Unitree founder Wang Xingxing gained attention after securing a front-row seat at a summit hosted by Chinese President Xi Jinping for leading technology entrepreneurs last year. The company is backed by prominent Chinese technology companies, including Tencent and Alibaba, as well as AI startup DeepSeek.
The development comes as China invests heavily in robotics. Last year, the country announced a state-backed venture capital fund aimed at attracting 1 trillion yuan ($148 billion) in public and private investment for AI, robotics and other high-tech startups over the next 20 years.
Chinese companies have also recently made major advances in the AI industry. Moonshot recently released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion-parameter open-weight model designed for software engineering and autonomous task execution. Meanwhile, Alibaba launched Qwen3.8-Max, which the company said outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro on several benchmarks while approaching Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.1 in coding-related evaluations. These developments have increased pressure on Silicon Valley as Chinese companies intensify competition in the AI industry.