If a humanoid robot cost less than your phone? You’d buy one. Maybe ten. One to cook. One to clean. Another to babysit? Maybe even one to take your job off your plate.
That is the pitch.
Zhou Yong thinks so. He’s the founder and CTO of LinkerBot. The man is 40. The startup is based in China. They build dexterous humanoid hands. Just the hands. Five fingers. At least 11 joints.
In China? You can buy one for $600.
That hand plays piano. Threads needles. Tightens screws. Assembles electronics. Zhou says in three or five years, that price will drop to $200. “Eventually, everyone will own ten robots on average.” He told WIRED that much.
Everyone talks about the robot legs. The marathons. The sprinting spectacle in Beijing. Legs get the hype. Hands are where the actual engineering hell lies.
Elon Musk agreed last fall. He called the hands “the majority of the engineering difficulty.” LinkerBot got that memo. Founded in 2024—wait, no, 2023—they moved fast.
Fast how fast?
Last year, LinkerBot shipped 10,00 hands. That represents 80% of global demand. They sold them to labs. To manufacturers. To other robot makers trying to figure out their own limbs.
Investors love it. Six fundraising rounds in 13 months. The Chinese government invested. So did Alibaba’s Ant Group. HongShan Capital threw in too. They are currently hunting for a round that values them at $6 billion. That is double what they said they were worth a few months ago.
Bloomberg reports they are exploring a public listing in Hong Kong. Zhou didn’t comment. He declined.
Back in 2019, Zhou sold an autonomous driving startup. Then he turned to robotics. He guessed the industry would boom around 2025. It surprised him. The growth came sooner than he thought.
OpenAI used to lead robotic hand development. Then American companies looked up and realized AI software—large language models—was more lucrative. They shifted focus. Chinese startups took the lead in hardware.
The valuation gap? Gone. Zhou says the gap between Chinese and US primary markets in robotics “has been basically erased.”
His lifelong dream? To build Doraemon.
The Japanese anime character with the pocket of infinite magical gadgets. Zhou’s WeChat avatar is Doraemon. Building a hand is the first step to that infinite utility.
Selling Shovels in a Gold Rush
Zhou argues you should do one thing. Well. Very well.
LinkerBot doesn’t build bodies. No legs. No torso. Just hands. This keeps them out of direct competition with giants like Unitree or Tesla. They are not making the miner. They are making the shovel.
Hong Shangguan, a veteran tech investor in China, gets it. When the market is this massive, specialization is survival. “It’s like selling water.” Or shovels.
LinkerBot wins on price. Their Linker Hand models range from $600 up to $15,005, depending on how many joints you need and how dexterous it has to be.
“Demos are impressive,” says Rui Ma, who runs Tech Buzz China. “Fewer can ship hands that factories can afford to install.”
Ma thinks LinkerBot is positioned to set the standard. At least in the short term.
Zhou is confident about China’s manufacturing prowess. His rule of thumb: If China starts at the same time as others, they lead. Solar panels? Electric vehicles? China won. Robotics? He expects the same.
He wants global manufacturers to see this not as a threat. As an opportunity. Lower costs. Faster adoption. Skepticism about Chinese quality is real. So he offers a warranty. One year. Exchange the hand if it fails.
Robots Will Replace Us
The rollout will happen in three acts.
First, performance. Dancing. Greeting guests. Emotional labor. Entertainment. Chinese companies are already doing this. We’ve seen it over the last year.
Next, defined jobs. Making drinks. Cooking meals. Sorting packages. Boring, repetitive, specific.
The final stage is the hardest. The home.
A robot cannot just know a home. It has to operate in hundreds of homes. Each has different layouts. Different objects. Different chaos. A simple job requires a complex mix of skills.
LinkerBot is testing its hands in sophisticated manufacturing facilities right now. The Chinese economy needs to upgrade its factories. So the startup uses robotic hands to make… robotic hands. Industrial utility. Real-world proof.
China had cheap labor for decades. That era is ending.
Shangguan visited EV factories. She talked to production managers. They admitted a shortage. Younger generations refuse factory work. “When we can’t find workers,” Shangguan said, “we also have to get robots.”
Zhou sees a future where robots are 100 times better than humans. They will completely replace us. He doesn’t sound scared. He sounds pragmatic.
“People don’t care about being unemployed,” Zhou argues. “They care if they receive welfare.”
He predicts an era of abundance. AI and robots will produce enough goods that work becomes obsolete. Inequality remains, of course. The rich fly to the moon. The poor fly to Italy.
That’s the picture he paints.
What does the world look like when we no longer need to work?
Maybe we’ll be busy watching the moon travel. Or maybe we’ll just be staring at a robot playing piano in the corner of a living room we didn’t clean.
