China’s robot-hand unicorn Linkerbot is hunting a $6bn valuation
May 4, 2026 - 6:50 am
Two years after a Beijing engineer started building dexterous hands inspired by a Japanese cartoon, his company holds 80% of the global market and is doubling its valuation in months.
Robotic hands are not, conventionally, the part of a humanoid robot that investors get excited about. The legs walk, the arms lift, and the head, increasingly, talks. The hands have always been the difficult part, fiddly bits of engineering with too many moving pieces and not enough commercial pull. For most of the past decade, capable, dexterous hands have been research projects, not businesses.
Linkerbot, a Beijing-based startup founded in 2023, is testing whether that has changed.
According to a Reuters report on May 4th, the two-year-old company is preparing to raise its next funding round at a $6bn valuation, double the $3bn it secured in a Series B+ closed days earlier.
Reuters describes Linkerbot as the global market leader in high-degree-of-freedom dexterous hands, with more than 80% share by volume and the only operation in the world capable of shipping above 1,000 units a month. Production, the company told Reuters, is on track to scale from roughly 5,000 units monthly to 10,000.
That is a striking pace for a category that, on most observers’ priors, was not a market until very recently.
From Doraemon to dexterity
Linkerbot’s chief executive, Alex Zhou Yong, told the South China Morning Post that the idea began in childhood with Doraemon, the Japanese cartoon cat whose magical pocket produces an inexhaustible supply of gadgets. Zhou, who studied robotics, eventually concluded that the trick was not the pocket but the hands. A robot that can manipulate objects with anything close to human dexterity does not need an infinite toolkit; it can use ours.
The company’s flagship Linker Hand series spans six to 42 degrees of freedom, the engineering measure of independent movement axes, and uses, according to Reuters, all the major actuation methods used in the field. The lightweight O6 model weighs 370g and is rated to handle a 50kg load. Higher-DoF variants, such as the L30, are aimed at research labs and humanoid integrators willing to pay for finer-grained control.
In demonstrations, the hands turn screws at speed, grasp soft objects without crushing them, thread a needle, and carry out high-precision assembly tasks. None of these is a particularly novel feat for a research prototype; earlier robot hands have managed similar tricks. Linkerbot is far from the only firm chasing the problem; Swiss startup mimic is using generative AI to teach a humanoid hand by watching humans work. The point, in Linkerbot’s pitch, is that the demos are now happening 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 the state-backed Zhongguancun Science Park Fund, Bank of China Asset Management, and Fosun Capital. The mix, private internet capital alongside state vehicles and a major bank, is a fair summary of where Chinese deeptech funding is concentrated in 2026.