China’s robot-hand unicorn Linkerbot targets $6bn valuation

Two years ago, a Beijing engineer was inspired by a Japanese cartoon to build dexterous robotic hands. Today, his company commands 80 percent of the global market and is on track to double its valuation in a matter of months. That kind of trajectory is rare in robotics, where hands have long been considered the most frustrating component to commercialize.

Conventionally, investors focus on a humanoid robot’s legs, arms, or increasingly, its conversational head. The hands, with their intricate engineering and limited commercial appeal, have historically remained confined to research labs. For most of the past decade, capable, dexterous hands were academic projects, not viable businesses.

Linkerbot, a Beijing-based startup founded in 2023, is now testing whether that paradigm has shifted.

According to a Reuters report on May 4, the two-year-old company is preparing its next funding round at a $6 billion valuation, double the $3 billion it secured in a Series B+ round that closed just days earlier. Reuters describes Linkerbot as the global market leader in high-degree-of-freedom dexterous hands, holding over 80 percent market share by volume. The company is the only operation worldwide capable of shipping more than 1,000 units per month, with production on track to scale from roughly 5,000 to 10,000 units monthly.

That pace is remarkable for a category that, until very recently, many observers did not consider a market at all.

The inspiration traces back to childhood. Linkerbot CEO Alex Zhou Yong told the South China Morning Post that the idea began with Doraemon, the Japanese cartoon cat whose magical pocket produces endless gadgets. Zhou, who studied robotics, eventually realized the real magic was not the pocket but the hands. A robot with near-human dexterity does not need an infinite toolkit; it can simply use ours.

Linkerbot’s flagship Linker Hand series ranges from 6 to 42 degrees of freedom, the engineering measure of independent movement axes. According to Reuters, the lineup incorporates all major actuation methods used in the field. The lightweight O6 model weighs just 370 grams yet is rated to handle a 50-kilogram load. Higher-DoF variants like the L30 target research labs and humanoid integrators willing to pay for finer control.

In demonstrations, these hands turn screws at speed, grasp soft objects without crushing them, thread a needle, and perform high-precision assembly tasks. While none of these feats is entirely new in research prototypes, Linkerbot’s key differentiator is that these demos now occur on a production line.

Early backers include Ant Group, the financial-services arm of Alibaba, and HongShan Group, the Chinese spin-out of Sequoia Capital. The latest round added state-backed Zhongguancun Science Park Fund, Bank of China Asset Management, and Fosun Capital. This mix of private internet capital, state vehicles, and a major bank reflects where Chinese deeptech funding is concentrated in 2026.

It also signals a broader trend. Investor interest in Chinese humanoid robotics has surged this year, fueled by viral demonstrations including the Beijing humanoid robot half-marathon in April, where a Tien Kung Ultra unit beat the human world record by seven minutes, and a televised performance by Unitree’s machines.

Unitree itself filed for a Shanghai listing in March at a target valuation of roughly $7 billion, having last raised privately at about $3 billion. Other Chinese players, including Galbot, AgiBot, and AI2 Robotics, are clustered in the $2 billion to $3 billion range.

The talent race in Chinese robotics has become so intense that rival UBTech has offered an $18 million package for a chief AI scientist. By that standard, a $6 billion valuation for a company that makes only the hands is an aggressive bet.

It also runs against a striking market gap. Figure AI, the leading US humanoid startup, raised at a $39 billion valuation in September 2025, despite shipping a fraction of the volume its Chinese counterparts manage. That disparity reflects how each side prices these companies. American investors treat humanoid firms as artificial-intelligence platforms; Chinese investors price them more cautiously as industrial hardware businesses. Linkerbot, which sells hands rather than entire robots, sits awkwardly between those framings.

The company’s expansion is more concrete than most pitches at this stage of the AI cycle. Reuters reports more than 400 employees and five factories across Beijing and Shenzhen. The most quietly ambitious detail: some of those factories are being designed as intelligent production lines where Linkerbot’s robotic hands assemble more robotic hands.

If that succeeds, it would be one of the first commercial demonstrations of dexterous manipulation moving from research into closed-loop manufacturing. It would also serve as a powerful internal proof point for potential customers.

Linkerbot also says it has built LinkerSkillNet, described as the largest real-world dataset of dexterous manipulation skills in operation, with more than 500 captured behaviors. While that figure has not been independently audited, the broader claim that the company is accumulating proprietary training data for next-generation manipulation models aligns with how rivals describe the strategic prize.

Whether $6 billion is too much for a hand maker, however dexterous, depends on which market thesis proves correct. If humanoid robots remain industrial niche products, Linkerbot’s role as a component supplier caps its upside, regardless of market share.

If, however, the field follows the trajectory China’s investors increasingly assume, with humanoids moving into logistics, services, and eventually domestic environments, hand suppliers with deep manufacturing capability and proprietary data could capture a disproportionate share of the value chain.

There are also softer risks: geopolitical exposure from state-fund investors and a Beijing-Shenzhen footprint at a time of renewed US scrutiny of Chinese deeptech, and the possibility that humanoid platforms eventually integrate hand designs in-house. Tesla, preparing its Shanghai Gigafactory for Optimus mass production, has signaled exactly that intention. Meta’s acquisition of Assured Robot Intelligence hints that platform players want the whole robot, not a third-party bill of materials.

Linkerbot’s bet is that being early, large, and the only volume supplier in its category will be enough to outrun those risks. Investors will price that bet in the next round. For now, a company that started with a cartoon cat and a hunch about hands is one of the most closely watched stories in global robotics, and one of the few where the headline numbers, market share, monthly volume, and employee count are not just promises.