The pitch is being made by Zhou Yong, the 40-year-old founder and chief technology officer of Linkerbot, one of China’s leading manufacturers of dexterous humanoid hands. The startup’s hardware comes with five fingers and at least 11 joints and is sold for at least $600 in China. Linkerbot’s hands can play the piano, thread needles, tighten screws and assemble electronics. Zhou estimates the price of one will drop to just $200 in three to five years. Eventually, “everyone will have an average of ten robots,” Zhou said in an exclusive interview with WIRED.
Marketing spectacles like the Humanoid Robot Marathon in Beijing have drawn attention to robot legs, but the real limitation in humanoids is the hands. “The most difficult part of engineering the entire robot is the hands,” Elon Musk said at an event last year. Founded in 2023, LinkerBot has quickly emerged as a market leader in this field. The company says it shipped 10,000 robotic hands last year, representing 80 percent of worldwide demand. Its customers include research laboratories, manufacturers, and other humanoid robot makers.
The startup is also a venture capital darling: It closed six rounds of fundraising in just 13 months from investors including the Chinese government, Alibaba’s Ant Group and Hongshan Capital, Sequoia Capital’s Chinese spinoff. Linkerbot is now seeking another round of financing at a valuation of $6 billion, which is double what the company said it was worth just a few months ago. And according to Bloomberg, it is reportedly exploring the possibility of going public in Hong Kong. (Zhou 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 predicted the industry would start growing rapidly around 2025, but was still surprised by how fast it grew. While OpenAI was once at the forefront of developing robotic hands, Chinese startups have taken the lead in recent years as many of their American counterparts have shifted their focus toward larger language models and other AI software.
For robotics companies, “the valuation gap between the Chinese and American primary markets has basically erased,” Zhou says.
Zhou says his lifelong goal is to create a real-life version of the Japanese anime character Doraemon, who has an unlimited supply of magical gadgets in his pocket. (His WeChat avatar is a photo of Doraemon.) He sees building a capable, dexterous hand as an important step toward achieving that dream.
Courtesy of Linkerbot
selling shovels to miners
Zhou argues that successful companies focus on doing one thing well. This is why Linkerbot focused on the hands instead of trying to create the entire body of a humanoid. This also allows it to avoid competing directly with leading humanoid companies like Unity or Tesla.
“When the size of the humanoid robot industry is this big, expertise in making hands is like selling water or shovels [during the gold rush]”says Hong Shangguan, an experienced investor in China’s tech industry and former partner at Beijing-based fund Legend Capital.
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