The $6 billion Chinese startup is trying to build hands for every robot

If you can Buy a Human robot For less than a smartphone, would you? Are you going to buy several robots to handle the cooking, cleaning, babysitting, and… Even your job?

That’s the presentation from Zhou Yong, the 40-year-old founder and CTO of LinkerBot, one of China’s leading manufacturers of skilled human hands. The startup’s devices come complete with five fingers and at least 11 joints, and sell for at least $600 in China. LinkerBot’s hands can play the piano, thread needles, tighten screws, and assemble electronic devices. Chu expects the price of each to fall to just $200 within three to five years. Eventually, “everyone will have an average of ten robots,” Zhou said in an exclusive interview with WIRED.

Marketing glasses like Humanoid Robotics Marathon In Beijing, attention has been drawn to the legs of robots, but the real limits of humans are hands. “The hands are the biggest part of the engineering difficulty of the entire robot,” Elon Musk said. It happened Last fall. Founded in 2023, LinkerBot has quickly emerged as a market leader in this space. The company says it shipped 10,000 robotic hands last year, representing 80% of global demand. Its clients include research laboratories, manufacturers, and other makers of humanoid robots.

The startup is also a darling of venture capital: It has completed six rounds of fundraising in just 13 months from investors including the Chinese government, Alibaba’s Ant Group, and HongShan Capital, the Chinese subsidiary of Sequoia Capital. LinkerBot is now seeking another round of funding With a valuation of $6 billionThat’s double what the company said it was worth just a few months ago. He is said to be exploring Go public In Hong Kong, according to Bloomberg. (Chu declined to comment on the rumored plans.)

In 2019, after selling a previous startup focused on autonomous driving, Zhou turned his attention to robotics. He says he expected the industry to start booming around 2025, but he’s still amazed at how quickly it’s growing. While OpenAI was once upon a time In the foreground In developing robotic hands, Chinese startups have in recent years taken the lead as many of their American counterparts have shifted their focus toward large-scale language models and other artificial intelligence software.

For robotics companies, “the valuation gap between the Chinese and US primary markets has basically been erased,” Zhou says.

Zhou says his lifelong goal is to create a real-life version of Doraemon, the Japanese anime character who has an infinite number of magical tools in her pocket. (His WeChat avatar is that of Doraemon.) He sees building a capable and dexterous hand as a useful step toward realizing that dream.

Selling shovels to miners

Successful companies focus on doing one thing well, says Chu. That’s why LinkerBot focused on the hands, rather than trying to build an entire human body. This also allows it to avoid direct competition with leading robotics companies such as Unitree or Tesla.

“When the scale of the humanoid robot industry is so huge, specializing in making hands is like selling water or shovels (during the gold rush),” says Hong Shangguan, a veteran investor in China’s technology industry and a former partner at Beijing-based fund Legend Capital.