Unitree

Spain’s Dirección General de Tráfico issued the country’s first operating licence for a Level 4 autonomous passenger vehicle on 10 September, and it went jointly to three companies: WeRide, Uber, and AVOMO, the self-driving unit of the Spanish rental group Moove Cars, with the Madrid city government supporting the application. The permit was granted under Spain’s ES-AV framework and clears the three of them to put vehicles on public roads, with commercial service to the public expected before the end of 2026 once the operating and regulatory conditions are met. Madrid is the fourth city in a WeRide and Uber plan the two say will reach 15 cities and tens of thousands of vehicles before 2030, and WeRide says it is now the only company whose products hold autonomous-driving permits in nine countries, naming China, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, France, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and the United States. The same morning Pony.ai and the mobility operator Verne said they had begun fully driverless robotaxi passenger testing on public roads in Zagreb, which they call the first anywhere in Europe. Set against both, Anfia chairman Roberto Vavassori asked the EU for an 80 percent tariff on Chinese vehicles and parts above a quota of 8 percent of annual new-car registrations, per Reuters, on top of the combined 18 to 45 percent the 2024 measure already charges Chinese electric vehicles. The proposal covers vehicles and parts and says nothing about software, fleet operations or a permit: a tariff is charged on an object crossing a border, and an operating licence is granted for a service performed inside one. In both deals that day the Chinese company supplied the driving stack while a European operator supplied the cars, the depot, the insurance and the relationship with the regulator, which is a template that travels without a vehicle being imported. Nine permits is nine permissions and no commercial service, Madrid is an expectation for later this year, and Zagreb is a test with passengers in it.

DeepSeek posted about 150 openings on 8 September and not one of them is a research role, per a WeChat notice read closely by QbitAI and republished by 36Kr. They split into server-side development engineers across six directions, which are the large-model research platform, Agent framework components, R&D efficiency infrastructure, the DeepSeek API, online serving and data engineering, and agent elastic-compute engineers across two, platform development and low-level systems, with a target profile of senior backend people two to ten years in. QbitAI puts the whole company at 300 to 500 people, so a single round is worth somewhere between a quarter and a half of existing headcount, hired into one function; an investor at a front-line firm told Sina Tech the goal for this year is 1,000 people, which would put DeepSeek level with Zhipu, whose 2025 prospectus listed 883 employees. What the 150 are being hired to build has a name: DSec, for DeepSeek Elastic Compute, disclosed for the first time in the V4 technical report as three Rust components, an API gateway called Apiserver, an Edge agent on every host machine and a cluster monitor called Watcher, wired over a homemade RPC protocol on top of 3FS, the distributed filesystem DeepSeek open-sourced last year. Cui Tianyi, who runs the DeepSeek Harness team, gave the reason in one sentence: scale produces complexity, and the complexity turns around and demands more scale. Underneath it is the money. Reuters reported on 9 September that DeepSeek has hired CITIC Securities to prepare a listing on Shanghai’s STAR Market and aims to start the process this year, which TechNode carried the same morning; Sina’s wire adds that CITIC has made contact and entered due diligence, that the two sides have not signed a formal listing-tutoring agreement, and that DeepSeek has said nothing officially.

Enflame’s allocation result, filed to the exchange on 7 September, priced 43,035,173 new shares at 142.18 yuan and records the online retail tranche subscribed 6,109.34 times. That tripped the clawback rule, which moves 10 percent of the public offering out of the institutional book once retail demand passes 100 times, growing the retail tranche from 6,885,500 shares to 10,328,500 at a final allotment ratio of 0.02455315 percent. The offline book was barely cooler: 291 institutions across 11,272 placement accounts bid 72.795 billion shares against a tranche of about 27.5 million, or 2,642.99 times. Enflame has never made a profit, so listing rules bar it from quoting a price-to-earnings multiple and its own investment-risk notice prints price-to-sales instead, 55.62 times pre-issue and 61.80 post-issue, valuing the company at 61.187 billion yuan. The same notice’s peer table, dated 28 August, averages 93.51 times sales, so the deal was priced under its comparables on purpose. Moore Threads went the other way the same day: 25,774,510 shares, 5.48 percent of the company, came off a nine-month lockup and the stock closed limit-down at 415.49 yuan against Friday’s 519.35, taking 48.8 billion yuan off its market value, with institutions net sellers of 1.462 billion. Its free float roughly doubled, from 6.43 percent to 11.91 percent, and the unlock is the only input that moved. Enflame’s own day-one free float is 17,900,325 shares of 430,351,728, or 4.16 percent, with 88.09 percent still locked and Caixin reporting close to 40 percent of the share capital coming free on 7 December.

Unitree booked 50,013,826.62 yuan of net profit attributable to shareholders in the first quarter of 2026, against 95,602,511.45 yuan a year earlier, on 68.49 percent more revenue. The half-year headline runs the other way, a 274 million yuan profit against a 32 million yuan loss, but Chinese listing rules make a company print earnings both with and without non-recurring items, and the 0.67 against 0.75 yuan ratio puts underlying first-half profit down 19.34 percent while revenue grew 48.54 percent. The gap is a 349 million yuan share-based payment charge that hit the first half of 2025 and did not recur. Research spending went from 6.9 to 11.8 percent of revenue and selling expense from 6.0 to 14.2 percent.

Unitree listed on Shanghai’s STAR Market on 19 August at 150.80 yuan a share and opened at 1,100. Four sessions later it closed at 602.80, taking about 200 billion yuan off the peak valuation. Only 7.44 percent of its shares were free to trade on listing day, and roughly 85 percent of that float changed hands in a single session. The mark matters most to companies with no ticker: eight domestic embodied-AI firms were valued at 20 billion yuan or more as of June, and those private marks were set against Unitree’s screen price. Its own filed half-year numbers are good, with revenue up 48.5 percent and a 274.0 million yuan profit against a loss.