Linkerbot
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| Legal name (Chinese) | 灵心巧手（北京）科技有限公司 (Lingxin Qiaoshou Beijing Technology Co., Ltd.) |
| English name | Linkerbot (also stylized LINKERBOT) |
| Founded | 2023 |
| Founder / CEO | Zhou Yong (周勇), English name Alex Zhou |
| Headquarters | Beijing, China |
| Additional offices | Silicon Valley (USA), Canada |
| Industry | Robotics, embodied AI, robot components |
| Product family | Linker Hand (LinkerHand) series dexterous robotic hands |
| Key technologies | Linkage drive, tendon (cable) drive, direct drive actuation; multimodal tactile sensing; LinkerSkillNet manipulation dataset; Open TeleDex teleoperation system |
| Most recent valuation | US$3 billion (Series B+, April 2026); seeking US$6 billion in next round (May 2026) |
| Reported headcount | 350 to 400+ employees (range across reports between late 2025 and May 2026) |
| Manufacturing | Four to five factories in Beijing and Shenzhen |
| Official website | linkerbot.cn / eng.linkerbot.cn |
| GitHub organization | linker-bot, linkerbotai |
Linkerbot, registered in China as 灵心巧手（北京）科技有限公司 (Lingxin Qiaoshou Beijing Technology Co., Ltd.), is a Beijing-based robotics company founded in 2023 by Zhou Yong, who also goes by Alex Zhou.[1][2] The firm designs and mass-produces high-degree-of-freedom dexterous hands for humanoid robots, industrial automation cells, and research labs. Its products are marketed under the Linker Hand (or LinkerHand) brand, and the company describes them as the physical interface layer for embodied AI systems that need to manipulate objects in the real world.[3][4]
Reuters, which broke the story of Linkerbot's most recent financing on 4 May 2026, reported that the company holds more than 80 percent of the global market for high-degree-of-freedom robotic hands by volume, and is the only operation in the world that ships above 1,000 high-DOF hands per month.[1][5] Press coverage published earlier in 2026 by The AI Journal, the Manila Times, and other PR Newswire syndication outlets put cumulative shipments of Linker Hand units at more than 10,000 by mid-December 2025.[6][7]
Linkerbot closed a Series B+ funding round in late April 2026 at a valuation of roughly US$3 billion. Backers in that round include Ant Group, HongShan (the Chinese partnership that span out of Sequoia China), the Zhongguancun Science Park Fund, Bank of China Asset Management, and Fosun Capital.[1][5] Within days the company began approaching investors about a follow-on round at a US$6 billion valuation, double the level it had just secured.[1][8]
The Linker Hand line spans 6 to 42 degrees of freedom and three actuation architectures (linkage, tendon, and direct drive), with retail prices documented from approximately 3,999 yuan (about US$560) for the O6 Lite up to 99,900 yuan (about US$13,780) for the L30 tendon-driven flagship.[9][10] The company pairs the hands with two in-house software stacks. LinkerSkillNet is a manipulation dataset that the company says contains more than 500 captured human dexterity skills, and Open TeleDex is a ROS 2 based teleoperation framework released as a technical report in October 2025 with co-authors from Tianjin University, Tsinghua University, and Linkerbot Inc.[3][11]
Customers cited in press releases and English-language coverage include Samsung Electronics, Siemens, Foxconn, and research groups at Stanford University, the University of Cambridge, the University of Hong Kong, Tsinghua University, and Peking University.[6][7][12] Linkerbot's own statements distinguish it from competing humanoid-robot makers (which build full bodies) and from generalist gripper firms; the company sells the end effector and the manipulation skill stack, with most full humanoids bolted on by integrators.
Linkerbot was founded in 2023 by Zhou Yong, a graduate of Huazhong University of Science and Technology's Youth Class (少年班), a programme that admits gifted students at younger-than-usual ages.[2][12] Pandaily's profile of the company places Zhou's entry into the Youth Class at age 14.[12] Before Linkerbot, Zhou spent time in the consumer internet sector. He told Pandaily that his previous venture reached around 300 million users with less than one percent of those users in mainland China, a profile he frames as his "Silicon Valley style" background.[12] South China Morning Post coverage notes Zhou's recurring reference to the Japanese cartoon character Doraemon as an inspiration; the cartoon's premise of a robot cat with a pocket that yields any tool on demand is the metaphor Zhou uses to argue for a single dexterous end effector instead of many specialized tools.[13][14]
The choice to focus on hands rather than full humanoid bodies set Linkerbot apart from contemporaries such as Unitree Robotics, AgiBot, XPeng Robotics, and others that were also being founded or scaled in 2022 and 2023. Zhou's stated thesis was that the hand is the chokepoint of useful manipulation; without a dexterous hand, a humanoid body is just an expensive forklift.[3][12]
The first Linker Hand models entered the market in 2024. According to the Pandaily profile and Linkerbot's own product pages on resellers such as AIFITLAB and Robots International, the early lineup combined linkage-driven O-series hands (lightweight, lower DOF, lower price) with higher DOF L-series hands aimed at research labs and humanoid integrators.[9][12][15]
In August 2024 a Linker L6 hand was used in a public piano-playing demonstration that became one of the company's signature marketing moments. SCMP, Interesting Engineering, and Tech360.tv all cite the demonstration as the moment when Linkerbot's name registered widely in the humanoid robot press.[13][14][16] An additional Linker L6 demonstration at Beijing's first humanoid-robotics competition in August 2025 included a robot pianist playing alongside a human pianist; SCMP reported that piece on 23 February 2026.[13]
In the second half of 2024 and into the first half of 2025, Linkerbot raised a series of early-stage rounds. The cumulative figure across these early rounds, as of the December 2025 PR Newswire announcement, was approximately US$150 million.[6][7] Individual round leads named in Chinese press include CCV (Creation Partners Capital) and HongShan (Sequoia China spinout).
Linkerbot's Series A++ round, closed in December 2025, was led by Sequoia China (HongShan) and CCV, according to TechNode.[3] On 18 December 2025 the company issued a PR Newswire release titled "10,000 Dexterous Hands Shipped, $150 Million Raised: Linkerbot Leads the Market" that aggregated its progress against industry milestones.[6][7] The release introduced the Linker Scholar Program for research collaboration and previewed the company's first CES booth.
At CES 2026 (Las Vegas, 6 to 9 January 2026), Linkerbot exhibited the full Linker Hand range and a workstation called Linker Craftsman that combined dual robotic arms with the L20 industrial hand.[17][18] The CES press release reiterated the 80 percent global market share claim, four proprietary factories, two-week delivery cycles, and named Samsung, Siemens, and Foxconn among its customers.[17]
A further Series A+ round (the company's fourth financing event in eight months, according to KrAsia) was reported in late November 2025. KrAsia named participants Zhejiang Provincial Innovation Investment Group, Deqing Industrial Investment, Leju Robotics, CDH Investments, Ginnva, Dongfang Precision, Aux, Huafu Investment, and Hongyi Fund, alongside Ant Group, HongShan, Wankai New Materials, and Dioo Microcircuits.[9]
Gasgoo reported on 12 February 2026 that Linkerbot closed a Series B round of nearly 1.5 billion yuan (roughly US$210 million at the time), with lead investors Daode Investment and Shengshi Investment, and additional participation from Yingyuan Puyuan Fund, NovaStar, Xinding Capital, Zhonghe Capital, Wise Road Capital, Chengzhu Investment, Linyun Capital, Jiaming Haochun, Caixin Capital, and Eastern Epic Capitals (Singapore).[19]
In the last week of April 2026 Linkerbot closed a Series B+ round at a roughly US$3 billion valuation, with reporting from Reuters, The Standard (Hong Kong), Semafor, eWeek, TechFundingNews, and The Next Web converging on the same investor list. New backers in that round included Zhongguancun Science Park Fund, Bank of China Asset Management, and Fosun Capital, alongside continued participation from Ant Group and HongShan.[1][5][8][20][21]
Days later, on 4 May 2026, Reuters' Laurie Chen reported that the company was preparing to raise a follow-on round at a US$6 billion valuation, double the figure it had just secured.[1] As of the date of this article the US$6 billion round had not closed publicly.
Figures are drawn from individual reseller product pages (Robots International, RobotShop, AIFITLAB, RCDrone), Pandaily's profile of the company, KrAsia's funding report, and the Linkerbot SDK repositories on GitHub. Where two sources disagree the table notes the discrepancy.
| Model | DOF (active / total) | Weight | Max payload | Repeatability | Actuation | Communication | Listed price | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Linker Hand O6 | 6 active / 11 joints | 370 g | 50 kg | not published | Linkage | CAN, RS-485 | RMB 6,666 (approx US$933) | Entry-level lightweight hand; 50 kg payload claim repeated across Reuters, TFN, and CES press release |
| Linker Hand O6 Lite | 6 active / 11 joints | not published | not published | not published | Linkage | CAN, RS-485 | RMB 3,999 (approx US$560) after subsidy | Subsidized education / consumer entry tier per KrAsia |
| Linker Hand O7 | 7 active / 17 (7 active + 10 passive) | 700 g | 5 kg | plusminus 0.20 mm | Linkage with passive joints | CAN, RS-485, ROS 2 driver | not published | Aluminium alloy frame, 6 by 12 resistive tactile array (72 cells), 12 N pinch force, 95-degree thumb yaw, 90-degree finger flexion |
| Linker Hand L6 | 6 active / 11 joints | 623.5 g | 28 kg | plusminus 0.20 mm | Linkage | CAN or RS-485 | RMB 19,900 (approx US$2,786) listed on AIFITLAB at US$3,999 | 10 N thumb force, 8 N four-finger force, 50 N grip; AIFITLAB list price differs from Chinese yuan list |
| Linker Hand L6 Industrial | 6 active / 12 total | not published | not published | not published | "Super Electric Cylinder" (brushless motor and ball screw) | CAN, RS-485 | not published | Unveiled at WAIC 2025 (Shanghai, 26 July 2025); 90 percent drive efficiency, 200 N screw-end thrust, 20 N fingertip force, more than 1 million cycle service life |
| Linker Hand L10 | 10 active / 20 (10 active + 10 passive) | 800 g | 25 kg | plusminus 0.20 mm | Linkage | CAN, RS-485 (EtherCAT noted on RobotShop) | US$5,999 on RCDrone | 15 N thumb fingertip force, 80 N grip; 6 by 12 piezoresistive array (20 N range, 100,000 cycles); optional capacitive sensor |
| Linker Hand L20 | 16 active / 21 (16 active + 5 passive) | 1.1 kg | 10 kg | plusminus 0.20 mm | Linkage | CAN, RS-485 | US$9,999 on AIFITLAB; RMB 49,900 (approx US$6,986) per KrAsia | 18 N thumb tip, 20 N per finger, 100 N combined grip; 600 kHz communication |
| Linker Hand L20 Lite | 20 joints | 800 g | not published | not published | Linkage | CAN, RS-485 | not published | Cost-down variant of L20 with piezoresistive sensors standard per Pandaily |
| Linker Hand L20 Pro | 20+ DOF | not published | not published | not published | Linkage | not published | not published | Pro version listed on Robots International |
| Linker Hand L30 | 22 active / 25 (22 active + 3 passive; manufacturer alternative count 17 active + 4 passive = 21) | 1.4 kg | 5 kg | plusminus 0.20 mm | Tendon (cable) drive | CAN FD at 500 kbps; USB to CAN adapter for PC | RMB 99,900 (approx US$13,780) per KrAsia | 12 N grip force, 3.5 N fingertip force, 440 to 450 degrees per second joint speed; targeted at research, surgery assistance |
| Linker Hand L25 | 25 DOF (SDK listing) | not published | not published | not published | not published | CAN | not published | Listed only in the linker-bot/linkerhand-ros-sdk repository |
| Linker Hand J42 | up to 42 DOF | not published | not published | not published | Tendon (cable) drive | CAN, RS-485, USB | not published | "Industrial Grade 6 Finger Claw" form factor per Robots International and Canada Satellite product listings |
The O-series is Linkerbot's lightweight tier. The O6 weighs 370 grams and carries up to 50 kilograms, a power-to-weight ratio that Linkerbot's own CES 2026 press release frames as "doubling the industry standard at one-tenth typical cost".[17] The model uses a PEEK (polyether ether ketone) reducer that replaces traditional metal gear trains. Reuters and BusinessWorld Online repeat the 50 kilogram and 370 gram figures in their April 2026 coverage of Linkerbot's funding.[1][5]
The O7 (sometimes written as 07) is a slightly larger 700 gram research-oriented model with 7 actively actuated DOF and 10 passive DOF; the manufacturer counts the configuration as 17 joints total. The aluminium alloy frame supports a 5 kilogram payload, and the hand is fitted with a 72-cell resistive tactile array (6 rows of 12 cells) and a plug-and-play ROS 2 driver. Repeatability is rated at plus or minus 0.20 millimetres.[22] Robots International lists the O7 separately from the older O6 entry, and the linkerbotai/linker_hand_sdk repository on GitHub names O7 as a supported model from SDK version 1.3.5 onward.[23]
The L-series targets industrial and research deployments. The L6 is a 6-DOF linkage-driven hand weighing 623.5 grams that takes a payload of up to 28 kilograms with a 50 newton combined grip; it is listed on the AIFITLAB reseller at US$3,999 and on Chinese channels around 19,900 yuan.[10][24] The L6 was the model that played piano in the WAIC 2025 and August 2025 humanoid robot competition demonstrations covered by SCMP, Tech360.tv, and 36Kr.[13][16][25]
The L10 has 10 active and 10 passive DOF, weighs 800 grams, and is rated for a 25 kilogram payload with up to 80 newtons of five-finger grip; it operates at 24 volts DC and ships with a 6 by 12 piezoresistive tactile array. RCDrone lists it at US$5,999.[26] An EtherCAT option is documented on the European RobotShop listing alongside CAN and RS-485 interfaces.[27]
The L20 (in 2025 and 2026 Linkerbot's most prominent industrial product) weighs 1.1 kilograms, hits 10 kilograms of payload, and produces up to 100 newtons of five-finger grip. The 21-joint configuration uses 16 actively actuated joints and 5 passive joints. KrAsia gives a yuan price of 49,900; AIFITLAB lists the international price at US$9,999.[9][28] At CES 2026 Linkerbot bundled two L20 hands onto its Linker Craftsman dual-arm workstation as a sealed application-ready unit for assembly, polishing, and pick-and-place lines.[17]
The L30 is the flagship tendon-driven model. Robots International publishes two DOF counts for the L30 (25 DOF including 2 wrist DOF as marketed; 17 actively actuated plus 4 passive joints for a total of 21 if the wrist is excluded), and notes that the two counts reflect different counting conventions across the manufacturer's English and Chinese documentation.[29] The L30 weighs 1.4 kilograms, carries up to 5 kilograms, and is the product that supplies the "22 DOF tendon-driven hand" framing used in RoboHub on X and the YouTube short titled "Can Robot Hands Beat Humans?".[30][31] Pandaily and KrAsia both list the L30 at 99,900 yuan in mainland China.[9][12] Its 440 to 450 degree per second joint speed and plus or minus 0.2 millimetre repeatability are cited as the model's strongest spec lines; the L30 is the product Linkerbot uses for needle threading, surgical-style demonstrations, and other fine-motor tasks shown at WAIC and CES.[9][17]
A separate "industrial master" Linker Hand L6 was unveiled at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2025 in Shanghai on 26 July 2025.[25] The industrial L6 retains a 6-DOF active configuration but uses a new actuator that Linkerbot calls a "super electric cylinder", combining a brushless motor with a ball screw. The cylinder is rated at 200 newtons of screw-end thrust and 20 newtons of fingertip force, with a service life exceeding one million cycles (Linkerbot claims two to three times the industry average). 36Kr's English-language report describes the L6 industrial as a "flexible manufacturing decision-making and execution terminal" rather than a human-shaped hand.[25]
The choice of a brushless motor and ball screw in an electric cylinder is unusual for the dexterous-hand category, which more often relies on a tendon pulley plus brushed motor or on direct-drive joint actuators. The trade-off is mechanical: a ball screw recirculates load through hardened steel balls and tolerates millions of cycles before bearing wear becomes a problem, where a tendon either fatigues at cable inflection points or stretches enough that calibration drifts. The cost is mass at the wrist (since the screw cannot be miniaturized indefinitely) and a longer kinematic chain between the motor and the fingertip. Linkerbot's published industrial L6 figures (200 newtons of thrust at the screw output, 20 newtons at the fingertip) imply a roughly 10:1 mechanical reduction in the linkage between the cylinder and the finger pad, which is consistent with a heavy-duty industrial mandate rather than a humanoid-aesthetic one.
The J42 is positioned as the highest DOF configuration in the catalogue, with reseller listings on Robots International and Canada Satellite branding it as an "Industrial Grade 6 Finger Claw".[15] The model's 42 DOF count is cited by Reuters, eWeek, and CES press materials in the form "6 to 42 DOF range" as a description of the company's product span.[1][17] Detailed specs for J42 (weight, payload, sensor count) are not published by the official channels reviewed for this article.
At CES 2026 Linkerbot exhibited the Linker Craftsman, a dual-arm workstation that bolts two L20 hands onto a desktop-scale dual-arm robot. Gasgoo also lists a Linker Le Fu robot band (a multi-instrument music-playing band of robotic arms with Linker hands) and a Linker Qiaojiang industrial workbench among the company's exhibited equipment as of February 2026.[19] Neither product has detailed public specifications.
| Tier | Model | RMB list | USD equivalent | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entry (subsidized) | O6 Lite | 3,999 | approx 560 | KrAsia, November 2025 |
| Entry | O6 | 6,666 | approx 933 | KrAsia |
| Industrial entry | L6 | 19,900 | approx 2,786 | KrAsia |
| Industrial / research | L10 | not separately quoted in yuan | US$5,999 on RCDrone | RCDrone |
| Industrial mid | L20 | 49,900 | approx 6,986; US$9,999 on AIFITLAB | KrAsia, AIFITLAB |
| Flagship | L30 | 99,900 | approx 13,986 | KrAsia, Pandaily |
The sub-7,000 yuan O6 Lite tier (and the O6 at 6,666 yuan) is the entry described in Chinese press reports as making dexterous hands affordable for university research labs and small integrators for the first time.[9][24] Pricing on international channels (AIFITLAB, RCDrone, RobotShop, Extend Robotics, Canada Satellite) is markup-driven and varies; the figures above describe official Chinese retail.
Linkerbot is unusual among dexterous-hand companies in shipping three actuation architectures across its catalogue: linkage drive, tendon (cable) drive, and direct drive.[3][12]
Linkerbot's CES 2026 release emphasizes that the company manufactures its own joint modules, motors, micro-reducers, and PEEK-based polymer reducers in-house, and that this vertical integration is what allows its claimed 10x durability and 1/20th unit cost relative to competitors.[17]
The Linker Hand family integrates two main classes of tactile sensor. The L10 product page documents a 6 by 12 piezoresistive array (72 cells) with a 20 newton range and a rated 100,000-cycle service life; the O7 listing on Robots International documents an equivalent 72-cell resistive tactile array.[22][26] An optional capacitive sensor on the L10 is rated at greater than or equal to 50 hertz sampling, a 0 to 30 newton range, 0.1 newton pressure sensitivity, and proximity detection of metal or human bodies at one centimetre. Pandaily describes the integration of pressure, tactile, force, and temperature sensors with "millimetre-level sensing accuracy" across the line, paired with the LinkerSkillNet data set and what the company calls a "cloud brain".[12]
The officially supported control interfaces are CAN bus and RS-485, with CAN FD at 500 kbps documented for the L30 and 600 kHz documented for the L20.[28][29] An EtherCAT interface is listed on the UK RobotShop entry for the L10 alongside CAN.[27] The CES 2026 press materials list USB as a third interface across the family.
Linkerbot maintains two GitHub organizations, linker-bot and linkerbotai. The active SDK repository is linker-bot/linkerhand-ros-sdk, which targets ROS Noetic on Ubuntu 20.04 with Python 3.8.10 and a USB-to-CAN adapter for the CAN bus connection. The earlier linkerbotai/linker_hand_sdk repository was archived on 29 August 2025 with a forwarding note to the new repository.[23] The SDK as of version 1.3.5 supports L7, L10, L20, L25, and O7 models.[23] A ROS 2 driver is documented on the O7 reseller page.[22]
LinkerSkillNet is Linkerbot's manipulation dataset. The company describes it as "the world's largest real-world dexterous manipulation dataset" in coverage from China Money Network and the SCMP, with more than 500 captured behaviours as of the May 2026 Reuters reporting cycle.[1][13] Interesting Engineering's coverage adds that the dataset is expected to roughly double every six months, and that the skills are designed to transfer across different robot bodies.[16] The data is collected through human teleoperation and the company's data factory workflow described in Rest of World's January 2026 feature on Chinese humanoid training centres.[32]
The skill categories visible across press materials and demonstrations include precision assembly (screw insertion, board population), soft-object handling (cloth folding, fabric pinching, fruit picking), medical-adjacent tasks (needle threading, suture handling, simulated surgical assistance), kitchen tasks (pouring coffee, plating food, chopping vegetables in CES demos), and musical performance (piano keystrokes, harp string plucking, drumming). The phrase "500 skills" should be understood as a working count rather than a fixed inventory: KrAsia describes a research roadmap in which Linkerbot intends to add several new skills per week as data collection pipelines mature.[9] Pandaily notes that the dataset is intended to feed back into the Linker Creation Model, which in turn is used to seed policy initialization for new tasks, with the goal of cutting the per-skill teleoperation data budget by an order of magnitude over time.[12]
Open TeleDex is Linkerbot's teleoperation system, released as a technical report on arXiv in October 2025 (preprint identifier 2510.14771) with authors from Tianjin University, Tsinghua University, and Linkerbot Inc.[11] The system is described as hardware-agnostic, with a three-tier ROS 2 architecture: a perception layer that standardizes input from VR controllers, haptic gloves, and master-slave arms; a control and data collection layer that synchronizes multi-modal recordings; and a hardware abstraction layer that supports the Agilex Piper arm, Linker Arm A7, Linker Hand O6, L10, and L20 across Intel RealSense D405 and D455 cameras.[11] The authors describe the design philosophy as "TripleAny": any robotic arm, any dexterous hand, any external input device. A novel hand-retargeting algorithm treats the robot hand as an integrated skeleton, matching the human's overall grasping intent rather than mimicking it point-by-point.[11]
TechNode and KrAsia describe a software stack above Open TeleDex and LinkerSkillNet that includes Linker OS (the operating environment for the hands and arms), the Linker Creation Model (a large-scale model used for skill synthesis), a physical-world simulator, and a real-world reinforcement learning framework that the company claims approaches a near 100 percent success rate on demonstration tasks.[3][9] Pandaily describes the assembled product as a "dexterous hands plus cloud brain" platform, where local hands collect data from physical interactions, aggregate it in the cloud, and re-deploy improved policies back to the fleet.[12]
The core data collection methodology pairs human teleoperation for capture with reinforcement learning for refinement, a pipeline that fits the broader pattern of imitation learning followed by reinforcement learning fine-tuning seen in vision-language-action models such as RT-2 and Pi0. Linkerbot has not published a foundation model under its own brand at the same scale as competitors such as Sanctuary AI or Figure AI, but Pandaily and TechNode both indicate that the company's strategy is to control the dataset and the hardware, then license or sell the resulting skill library to integrators.[3][12]
Linkerbot's funding history is unusual in its compression: the company moved from seed funding to a US$3 billion Series B+ valuation in under three years, and was reported to be circling US$6 billion before the Series B+ paperwork was a month old.[1] Confirmed rounds are summarized below.
| Round | Date (announced) | Amount | Lead and notable investors | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Early rounds (pre-Series A through Series A) | Through October 2025 | Cumulative approx US$150 million | Various, with Sequoia China / HongShan presence | Linkerbot PR Newswire, 18 December 2025 |
| Series A++ | December 2025 | Not disclosed publicly | Sequoia China, CCV (Creation Partners Capital) | TechNode, 23 January 2026 |
| Series A+ (fourth financing in 8 months) | November 2025 (KrAsia reporting) | Nine-figure RMB sum (approx US$30 to 100 million range, exact amount not disclosed) | Zhejiang Provincial Innovation Investment Group, Deqing Industrial Investment, Leju Robotics, CDH Investments, Ginnva, Dongfang Precision, Aux, Huafu Investment, Hongyi Fund, Ant Group, HongShan, Wankai New Materials, Dioo Microcircuits | KrAsia, 27 November 2025 |
| Series B | 12 February 2026 | Nearly RMB 1.5 billion (approx US$210 million) | Daode Investment, Shengshi Investment (leads); Yingyuan Puyuan Fund, NovaStar, Xinding Capital, Zhonghe Capital, Wise Road Capital, Chengzhu Investment, Linyun Capital, Jiaming Haochun, Caixin Capital, Eastern Epic Capitals (Singapore) | Gasgoo, 12 February 2026 |
| Series B+ | Late April 2026 | Not separately disclosed; valuation approx US$3 billion post-money | Ant Group, HongShan, Zhongguancun Science Park Fund, Bank of China Asset Management, Fosun Capital | Reuters / The Standard, 4 May 2026 |
| Series B+ extension or pre-IPO (target) | Reported May 2026, not closed at time of article | Not disclosed; valuation target approx US$6 billion | Not yet disclosed | Reuters, 4 May 2026 |
The round-to-round picture has caveats. The SignalBase aggregator lists a US$150 million round on 26 February 2026 that is most likely the cumulative funding figure used in the PR Newswire release rather than a single round.[33] Pitchbook's aggregated total of approximately US$229 million across all rounds is consistent with the cumulative figure once the February 2026 Series B is added on top of the prior US$150 million.[34] Names of round leads sometimes vary across English and Chinese coverage because some Chinese reports name domestic LP-side vehicles by their Chinese registration rather than their English brand.
Reuters' framing of the April 2026 round emphasizes that the Series B+ was led principally by Ant Group and HongShan with the three state-linked entities (Zhongguancun, Bank of China Asset Management, Fosun Capital) as participants.[1] Pandaily, KrAsia, and TechNode describe the strategic logic as bringing in industrial supply-chain LPs (Wankai New Materials for engineering polymers; Dongfang Precision for precision components) at earlier stages, and adding large-cap financial backers (Ant, HongShan, Bank of China, Fosun) closer to commercial scale-up.[3][9][12]
Linkerbot organizes its customer base into three commercial tracks. The research track sells hands one or two at a time to university labs, often with discounted pricing under the Linker Scholar Program announced in December 2025. The integrator track sells in batches of dozens to hundreds to humanoid robot makers, with most of those customers protected under NDAs that Zhou Yong cited in the Reuters interview as the reason names are not disclosed.[1] The industrial track sells to electronics, automotive, and consumer-goods manufacturers, with Samsung, Siemens, and Foxconn named as anchor accounts in the CES 2026 press materials.[17]
The distribution channel structure follows the same segmentation. International resellers (Robots International, RobotShop, AIFITLAB, Extend Robotics, RCDrone, Canada Satellite) typically serve the research and small-integrator track at single-unit pricing. Direct accounts handle the industrial track at volume pricing that is not publicly disclosed. Linkerbot's eng.linkerbot.cn English subdomain, which is a single-page web application, points international customers toward the reseller network rather than into a direct e-commerce flow.
The statement that Linkerbot holds more than 80 percent of the global market for high-degree-of-freedom dexterous hands appears in Reuters, The Standard (Hong Kong), Semafor, BusinessWorld Online, eWeek, TechFundingNews, the Linkerbot CES 2026 press release, and the Linkerbot December 2025 PR Newswire announcement.[1][5][6][17] In every case the claim is sourced to Linkerbot itself or quoted from Zhou Yong; no independent third-party market research firm has been cited. The claim is qualified in two important ways:
The four named direct competitors in 2025 to 2026 Chinese coverage are Inspire Robots, Xynova, DexRobot, and Tesla's Optimus hand programme.[18] Wuji Tech, which supplies the Genesis AI Hand 1.0, is the closest direct architectural rival on the tendon-driven side of the market and ships from Shenzhen.[35] Xynova in particular has scaled rapidly since its late-2024 founding, raising more than 100 million yuan in a December 2025 angel round led by CATL Capital with Xiaomi Strategic Investment as a co-investor, and adding a Pre-A round of "hundreds of millions of yuan" in March 2026; its Flex 1 hand has 25 total degrees of freedom on a 380 g palm, and the May 2026 Flex 2 introduced a hybrid cable plus direct-drive architecture with 23 DOF, ±0.1 mm repeatability, and 0.05 N force control on a 400 g palm.[42][43][44]
Linkerbot's customer roster, as disclosed across multiple press releases and the company's own communications, includes the following confirmed names. Where the customer is mentioned only in Linkerbot's marketing rather than confirmed by the buyer, the table notes the qualification.
| Customer | Type | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Samsung Electronics (Samsung) | Industrial / research customer | CES 2026 press release, Interesting Engineering, Tech360.tv |
| Siemens | Industrial customer | CES 2026 press release, Linkerbot PR Newswire December 2025 |
| Foxconn (Hon Hai) | Industrial customer | CES 2026 press release, SignalBase |
| Midea | Industrial customer | SignalBase |
| Stanford University | Research customer | Multiple, including Pandaily, Interesting Engineering |
| University of Cambridge | Research customer | Multiple, including Pandaily, Linkerbot PR Newswire |
| University of Hong Kong | Research customer | Interesting Engineering |
| Tsinghua University | Research customer (also co-author affiliation on Open TeleDex paper) | Pandaily, Open TeleDex preprint |
| Peking University | Research customer | Pandaily |
| MIT | Research customer | Linkerbot PR Newswire December 2025 |
| Tianjin University | Research collaborator | Open TeleDex preprint |
| Unnamed leading Chinese humanoid robot makers | Humanoid integrator customer | Reuters, BusinessWorld Online (CEO declined to name under NDA) |
| Unnamed foreign industrial giants | Industrial customer | Reuters (CEO declined to name under NDA) |
CEO Zhou Yong told Reuters that the company sells to several leading Chinese humanoid makers and several foreign industrial firms whose identities are protected under non-disclosure agreements.[1][5] The press release language at CES and in December 2025 names Samsung, Siemens, and Foxconn as customers, but in none of those cases is there a buyer-side confirmation. The Open TeleDex preprint (Tianjin University, Tsinghua University, Linkerbot) confirms a collaborative research relationship between the company and the two universities.[11]
The company has not announced a public supply relationship with Genesis AI; Humanoids Daily's confirmation of Wuji Tech as the Genesis AI hardware partner explicitly rules out the rival firm as the source of the Genesis Hand 1.0.[35] Linkerbot is also reported to be distinct from the "Lingzu Shidai" (灵足时代) brand that has appeared in some Chinese press; Linkerbot's registered Chinese name is 灵心巧手, not 灵足时代, and the World Robot Conference 2026 exhibitor listing uses 灵心巧手（北京）科技有限公司.[36]
Linkerbot operates four to five factories across Beijing and Shenzhen (Reuters and BusinessWorld Online say five; the CES 2026 press release says four). Production scaled from 1,000 hands per month in late 2025 to roughly 5,000 hands per month by early 2026, with the explicit target of 10,000 hands per month "soon" and an annual target of 50,000 to 100,000 units in 2026.[1][3][5][17]
The most striking element of the production strategy is recursive automation: Linkerbot's CES 2026 release and Pandaily's profile both report that the company is building production lines on which Linker Hands assemble other Linker Hands and Linker Arms.[12][17] The motivation is that the high-DOF hands are precisely the tool needed to wire, route, and bolt the small parts inside other high-DOF hands; using the product to build itself collapses a labour cost that would otherwise scale linearly with output.
The in-house manufacturing scope covers joint modules, brushless motors, micro-reducers, PEEK polymer reducers, and tactile sensing skins. Linkerbot does not publicly disclose suppliers of the underlying motor windings or the silicon controllers, but the supply chain LPs named in the funding rounds (Wankai New Materials for engineering polymers; Dongfang Precision for precision components; Dioo Microcircuits for semiconductors) imply close commercial ties to those firms.[9]
The shift from a 5,000 to a 10,000 hand per month production tempo is also a shift from manual assembly to robot-assisted assembly. Linker hands have a high small-parts count (motors, reducers, tactile cells, cables or linkages, joint bearings, optical encoders, controller boards, harnesses), and at low volumes the labour cost of routing a tendon or seating a piezoresistive cell into a fingertip overwhelms the material cost. At higher volumes, the company can amortize the fixed cost of building a Linker-hand-shaped fixture jig and then using its own hands to wire, route, and bolt the parts inside the next batch of hands. Pandaily reports that the bottleneck Linkerbot is solving with this approach is human dexterity at the wrist scale, since the small clearances inside a tendon-driven L30 are exactly the regime where a human assembler is slow and tires quickly. The same reasoning applies in reverse to the L20 industrial cell at CES, which Linkerbot uses as both a product and a process demonstration.[12][17]
Zhou Yong, who uses the English name Alex Zhou, founded Linkerbot in 2023 and is its CEO. He graduated from the Youth Class of Huazhong University of Science and Technology (Pandaily reports entry to the programme at age 14). Before founding Linkerbot he ran a consumer-internet venture that grew to about 300 million users with less than one percent of those users in mainland China, a profile he describes as "Silicon Valley style".[12][37] He entered the robotics industry in 2019.[37] Press accounts vary on whether his prior internet venture was a single company or two; KrAsia describes him as "Founder and CTO" (rather than CEO) in its November 2025 profile, an inconsistency with other coverage that may reflect a brief title change.[9]
Zhou's public statements frame Linkerbot's mission as "creating one million dexterous hands to master one million skills", a phrasing that recurs across Reuters, Interesting Engineering, and Pandaily.[1][12][16] His Doraemon reference is the company's standard origin story; he has said publicly that the cartoon's image of a single tool capable of producing any other tool is the metaphor that motivates the choice to build dexterous hands rather than specialized grippers.[13][14]
Cao Gang leads Linkerbot's algorithms team. KrAsia's November 2025 profile credits him with managing a 100-researcher team responsible for the company's large-model development.[9] He is not publicly identified beyond that role in the English-language press reviewed for this article.
Linkerbot has stated that it intends to roughly double the size of its research team by the end of 2026, from a base described as 300 to 350 researchers depending on the source. Interesting Engineering quotes a target of approximately 600 researchers, and Tech360.tv reiterates the same plan.[16][41] The expansion is the principal stated use of proceeds from the Series B+ round.
The December 2025 PR Newswire release announced Linkerbot's placement on the Forbes Asia 100 To Watch list and on The Information's "50 Most Promising Startups of 2025" list.[6][7] The same release noted that Linkerbot won first place in the 2024 Zhongguancun Bionic Robot Competition. The CES 2026 press materials reiterate those recognitions and describe the company as "the only entity globally to achieve mass production of high-DOF dexterous hands".[17][33]
Reuters' May 2026 piece, written by Laurie Chen, is the most-cited single English-language story on the company. The Standard (Hong Kong), BusinessWorld Online, MarketScreener, Investing.com, VnExpress International, ARY News, Daily Ittehad, and many other outlets syndicate the Reuters wire.[1][5][20][38] Semafor's coverage of the same news from Aitor Hernandez-Morales adds the contextual point that Beijing has committed nearly US$140 billion in state venture capital to support the humanoid robot sector, which informs the speed at which the Linkerbot valuation can climb.[8]
Independent skeptics are not absent. Semafor quotes analysts who question the commercial viability of humanoid robotics at present-day costs (Unitree, AgiBot, UBTech machines run roughly US$100,000 to US$150,000 each in industrial configuration); a McKinsey citation in the same piece notes that China may achieve hardware scale and early cost compression but faces challenges from Western AI dominance, which could create a bifurcated global market.[8]
The registered Chinese name of the company is 灵心巧手（北京）科技有限公司 (Lingxin Qiaoshou Beijing Technology Co., Ltd.), as listed on the World Robot Conference 2026 exhibitor page, on the AGI Camp profile, and across the linkerbot.cn domain.[36][39] The brand "灵心巧手" can be glossed as "clever hands with a perceptive heart" or, more idiomatically, "deft and intelligent hands". The English-facing brand is Linkerbot (sometimes stylized LINKERBOT) and the product brand is Linker Hand (sometimes LinkerHand, one word, in marketing materials).
Some English-language Reuters-derived reports have rendered the Chinese name as "灵足时代" (Lingzu Shidai, literally "era of nimble feet"), but this is a separate company and not the official Chinese name of Linkerbot. The author of this article has cross-checked the World Robot Conference exhibitor listing, the AGI Camp company directory, the linkerbot.cn brand page, and the linker-bot GitHub organization, and all four resolve to 灵心巧手 as the registered Chinese name.[36][39]
| Company | Hands product family | Architecture | Reported DOF range | Market position |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Linkerbot (灵心巧手) | Linker Hand O6 / O7 / L6 / L10 / L20 / L30 / J42 | Linkage, tendon, direct drive | 6 to 42 | More than 80 percent share of high-DOF segment by volume (Reuters, self-reported) |
| Wuji Tech (Shenzhen) | Wuji Hand | Direct drive, back-drivable | High double digit DOF | Hardware partner to Genesis AI Hand 1.0; Shenzhen-based mass production (Humanoids Daily) |
| Inspire Robots | Inspire Hand | Tendon | 6 to 12 typical | Long-standing Chinese hand maker, cited by Gasgoo as a peer |
| Xynova (Hangzhou) | Flex 1, Flex 2 | Tendon (Flex 1), hybrid cable plus direct drive (Flex 2) | 20 active (Flex 1) to 23 total (Flex 2) | Hangzhou-based; backed by CATL and Xiaomi; orders for more than 10,000 hands by Q2 2026 |
| DexRobot | Various | Direct drive | Mid-DOF | Smaller-scale Chinese peer, cited by Gasgoo |
| Tesla Optimus hand programme | Optimus Gen 2 / Gen 3 hand | Tendon (cable) | 22 DOF (Tesla disclosed) | In-house programme for Tesla's humanoid robot |
Linkerbot's distinguishing feature against peers, beyond its volume claim, is that it ships across all three actuation architectures and supports both research-scale lots (single hand orders at university list price) and integrator-scale lots (hundreds to thousands of hands per customer per quarter). That makes the company a one-stop supplier in a way that the Inspire-Xynova-DexRobot trio (each typically with a single architecture) is not.[18][19]
Linkerbot's headquarters is in Beijing.[1] Pandaily reports satellite offices in Silicon Valley and Canada, with Zhou acknowledging that "brand recognition overseas still needs work".[12] The company's CES 2026 booth was at Las Vegas Convention Center Central Hall, booth 20044.[6][7]
Linkerbot maintains two GitHub organizations. The older linkerbotai organization hosts archived repositories for the original LinkerHand ROS SDK (Python 39 percent, C 43 percent, C++ 17 percent by code share) and a ROS 2 variant, both archived on 29 August 2025.[23] The active linker-bot organization hosts linkerhand-ros-sdk, which targets ROS Noetic on Ubuntu 20.04 with Python 3.8 and supports L7, L10, L20, L25, and O7 from version 1.3.5. The SDK uses a USB-to-CAN adapter to talk to the hand at a 1,000,000 baud rate over CAN bus.
Linkerbot's published code makes the company a comparatively open hardware provider for a Chinese robotics startup of its size. The arXiv preprint for Open TeleDex (October 2025) is available without paywall, and the Linker Scholar Program described in the December 2025 PR Newswire release is the company's vehicle for distributing hands to research labs at reduced rates in exchange for use of the data and publications.[6][11]
Linkerbot operates inside a Chinese policy environment that has prioritized humanoid robots as a strategic technology. China produced roughly 12,000 humanoid robots in 2025, a 420 percent year-on-year increase according to figures cited by SCMP, and the market accounts for about half of global humanoid output (Chinese revenue in 2025 was approximately 17 billion yuan, or about US$2.5 billion).[13] Beijing has committed nearly US$140 billion in state venture capital to support humanoid robotics and adjacent industries, a figure that Semafor quotes in the May 2026 funding story.[8]
Within that environment Linkerbot's position is unusual. The company has chosen to compete in components (hands) rather than full humanoid systems, which would put it head to head with Unitree, AgiBot, XPeng, and others. Component competition lets Linkerbot sell to all of them at once. The company's pricing (3,999 yuan O6 Lite at the bottom; 99,900 yuan L30 at the top) allows it to address consumer-adjacent education buyers and industrial integrators with the same supply chain.
The risk side of the bet is that the high-DOF hand is an unsettled technical category. A switch in industry consensus toward simpler grippers, soft hands, or direct-drive backdrivable arms (the path Wuji Tech has taken with Genesis AI) could erode Linkerbot's volume claim faster than its lead would suggest. The 80 percent share figure is also self-reported and has not been independently audited by any market research firm cited in this article.