A $6 Billion Chinese Inventor Is Trying to Build Hands on Every Robot

If you can buy a a humanoid robot less than a cell phone, would you? Can you buy multiple robots to cook, clean, babysit, and even your job?

That’s the phrase coined by Zhou Yong, the 40-year-old founder and chief technology officer of LinkerBot, one of China’s leading manufacturers of artificial humanoid hands. The basic device comes with five fingers and 11 connectors and sells for less than $600 in China. LinkerBot’s hands can play the piano, thread needles, tie screws, and assemble electronics. In three to five years, Zhou predicts, the price per person will drop to just $200. Eventually, “everyone will have about ten robots,” Zhou said in an interview with WIRED.

Commercial previews like humanoid robot marathon in Beijing attracted the attention of robot legs, but the real limit of humanoids are hands. “Hands are the biggest technical challenge of all robotics,” said Elon Musk event last fall. Launched in 2023, LinkerBot has quickly emerged as a market leader in the space. The company says it shipped 10,000 robotic arms last year, representing 80 percent of global demand. Its customers include research labs, manufacturers, and other manufacturers of humanoid robots.

The startup is back with venture capital: It completed six rounds of funding 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 looking for another round of funding at a cost of $6 billiondouble what the company said it was worth a few months ago. And they say they are investigating to go public in Hong Kong, according to Bloomberg. (Zhou declined to comment on the speculation.)

In 2019, after selling previous startups focused on autonomous driving, Zhou focused on robotics. He said that he had predicted that the business would start to grow by the end of 2025, but he was still surprised by how much it has grown. Whereas OpenAI was once upon a time forward in developing robotic arms, in recent years Chinese startups have taken the lead while many of their American counterparts have shifted their focus to larger forms of language and other AI applications.

For the robotics industry, “the price difference between the major markets of China and the US will be eliminated,” Zhou says.

Zhou says his lifelong goal is to create a real-life version of Doraemon, the Japanese cartoon character who has unlimited magical weapons in his pocket. (His WeChat avatar is a picture of Doraemon.) He sees building a capable, knowledgeable hand as a necessary step to realizing that dream.

Selling Shovels To Miners

Successful companies, Zhou argues, focus on doing one thing well. That’s why LinkerBot went hand-in-hand, instead of trying to create a full humanoid body. This also helps to avoid direct competition with leading humanoid companies such as Unitree or Tesla.

“When the development of humanoid robots is so big, focusing on manufacturing is like selling water or shovels (during the gold rush),” said Hong Shangguan, a veteran entrepreneur in China’s tech industry and a former partner at Beijing-based Legend Capital fund.