If you could You’d buy a humanoid robot for less than a smartphone, right? Would you buy several robots for cooking, cleaning, childcare, or even work?
This is the proposal presented 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 has five fingers and at least 11 joints and costs just $600 in China. LinkerBot’s hands can play the piano, thread needles, tighten screws and assemble electronics. Zhou predicts that in three to five years, the price per unit will drop to just $200. Eventually, “everyone will have an average of ten robots,” Zhou said in an exclusive interview with WIRED.
Marketing spectacles such as the Beijing Humanoid Robot Marathon have drawn attention to robot legs, but the real frontier among humanoids is the hands. “Hands represent most of the design difficulty of the entire robot,” said Elon Musk event last fall. Founded in 2023, LinkerBot has quickly become a market leader in this field. The company says it shipped 10,000 robotic hands last year, representing 80 percent of global demand. Its clients include research laboratories, manufacturers and other developers of humanoid robots.
The startup is also a darling of venture capital: in just 13 months, it has completed six rounds of fundraising from investors including the Chinese government, Alibaba’s Ant Group and HongShan Capital, the Chinese arm of Sequoia Capital. LinkerBot is now looking for its next round of funding at a valuation of $6 billionthat’s double the value the company claimed just a few months ago. And apparently he’s exploring going public According to Bloomberg in Hong Kong. (Zhou declined to comment on the rumored plans.)
In 2019, after selling a previous startup focused on autonomous driving, Zhou focused on robotics. He says he predicted the industry would begin to take off around 2025, but he was still surprised by how swift it was growing. While OpenAI once led the way in developing robotic hands, Chinese startups have taken the lead in recent years as many of their American counterparts focus on enormous language models and other AI software.
For robotics companies, “the valuation gap between the original Chinese and U.S. markets has essentially closed,” Zhou says.
Zhou says his life’s goal is to create a real-life version of Doraemon, a Japanese anime character who has an endless supply of magical gadgets in his pocket. (His WeChat avatar is a photo of Doraemon). For him, building a functional, dexterous arm is an instrumental step towards achieving this dream.
Courtesy of LinkerBot
I will sell shovels to miners
Zhou says successful companies focus on doing one thing well. So LinkerBot focused on the hands instead of trying to build a full humanoid body. This also avoids direct competition with leading humanoid companies such as Unitree or Tesla.
“When the size 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, an experienced investor in the Chinese technology industry and former partner of the Beijing-based Legend Capital fund.