The $6 Billion Chinese Startup Trying to Build Hands for Every Robot

If you could bargain a humanoid robot for little than a smartphone, would you? Would you bargain respective robots to grip cooking, cleaning, babysitting, and adjacent your job?

This is the transportation being made by Zhou Yong, the 40-year-old laminitis and main exertion serviceman of LinkerBot, 1 of China’s starring manufacturers of dexterous humanoid hands. The startup’s hardware comes implicit with 5 fingers and astatine slightest 11 joints and is sold for arsenic small arsenic $600 successful China. LinkerBot’s hands tin play piano, thread needles, tighten screws, and assemble electronics. In 3 to 5 years, Zhou predicts, the terms for 1 volition autumn to conscionable $200. Eventually, “everyone volition ain 10 robots connected average,” Zhou said successful an exclusive interrogation with WIRED.

Marketing spectacles similar the humanoid robot marathon successful Beijing person drawn attraction to robots’ legs, but the existent frontier successful humanoids is hands. “The hands are the bulk of the engineering trouble of the full robot,” Elon Musk said astatine an lawsuit past fall. Founded successful 2023, LinkerBot has rapidly emerged arsenic a marketplace person successful the space. The institution says it shipped 10,000 robotic hands past year, representing 80 percent of worldwide demand. Its clients see probe labs, manufacturers, and different humanoid robot makers.

The startup is besides a task superior darling: It completed six rounds of fundraising successful conscionable 13 months from investors including the Chinese government, Alibaba’s Ant Group, and HongShan Capital, Sequoia Capital’s Chinese spinoff. LinkerBot is present seeking different circular of financing astatine a $6 cardinal valuation, treble what the institution said it was worthy lone a fewer months ago. And it’s reportedly exploring going nationalist successful Hong Kong, according to Bloomberg. (Zhou declined to remark connected the rumored plans.)

In 2019, aft selling a erstwhile startup focused connected autonomous driving, Zhou turned his attraction to robotics. He says helium predicted the manufacture would statesman booming astir 2025, but was inactive taken aback by however rapidly it grew. While OpenAI was erstwhile astatine the forefront of processing robotic hands, successful caller years Chinese startups person taken the pb arsenic galore of their American counterparts shifted their absorption toward ample connection models and different AI software.

For robotics companies, “the valuation spread betwixt the Chinese and US superior markets has been fundamentally erased,” Zhou says.

Zhou says his lifelong extremity is to marque a real-life mentation of Doraemon, the Japanese anime quality that has an infinite proviso of magical gadgets successful its pocket. (His WeChat avatar is simply a representation of Doraemon.) He sees gathering a capable, dexterous manus arsenic an instrumental measurement toward achieving that dream.

Selling Shovels to Miners

Successful companies, Zhou argues, absorption connected doing 1 happening well. That’s wherefore LinkerBot zeroed successful connected hands, alternatively than trying to physique the full assemblage of a humanoid. That besides allows it to debar straight competing with starring humanoid companies similar Unitree oregon Tesla.

“When the humanoid robot manufacture size is truthful massive, specializing successful making hands is similar selling h2o oregon shovels [during the golden rush],” says Hong Shangguan, a seasoned capitalist successful China’s tech manufacture and a erstwhile spouse astatine the Beijing-based money Legend Capital.