China robot-hand-building unicorn Linkerbot targets $6 billion valuation

BEIJING: Chinese robotics startup Linkerbot, the global market leader in highly dexterous robotic hands for humanoids, will seek a $6 billion valuation ​in its next financing round, double the valuation in a just-closed funding, the company said.

Beijing-based Linkerbot completed what it called a “series B+” funding ‌round last week that valued it at $3 billion. It did not say when the next funding round will be launched or whether it was targeting the previously undisclosed $6 billion valuation in a private investment round or in an initial public offering.

Prominent early backers of the two-year-old unicorn include Alibaba’s Ant Group and Sequoia spin-off HongShan Group, while the state-backed Zhongguancun Science Park Fund, Bank ​of China Asset Management and Fosun Capital participated in the latest round, the company said in a statement on Thursday.

Linkerbot currently holds over 80% ​of the global market share in high-degree-of-freedom (DoF) robotic hands, and plans to scale production “soon” to 10,000 units a month from almost ⁠5,000 currently, CEO Alex Zhou told Reuters in an interview.

Investor interest in China’s humanoid robotics industry has surged this year after market leaders such as Unitree demonstrated ​their products’ staggering technical advances during a widely watched TV performance and the Beijing humanoid robot half-marathon last month. Unitree filed for a Shanghai IPO in March, seeking a valuation of ​up to $7 billion.

Unlike competing humanoid makers such as X Square Robot that focus on training robotic hands for household chores, Linkerbot specialises in high-value human craftsmanship.

“We aren’t just making hands. Our goal is to replicate the entire library of human dexterous skills within our hardware,” Zhou said, referring to the firm’s LinkerSkillNet platform, which he claims is the world’s largest real-world dexterous manipulation dataset.

The platform ​is a multimodal data collection system that converts human skills into standardised, reusable capabilities for robotic hands, containing over 500 skills so far.

“The hand is the most ​complex part of the whole humanoid robot. Elon Musk described on several occasions that the part was taking more than half of their whole engineering effort for Tesla’s Optimus,” said Georg ‌Stieler, head ⁠of robotics and automation at technology consultancy Stieler.

Musk promised that the latest Optimus model, to be launched this spring, will have “the manual dexterity of a human”.

TECHNICAL FRONTIER

Inspired by his childhood fondness for Doraemon, the Japanese cartoon robotic cat who holds an infinite array of gadgets in his pocket, CEO Zhou envisions his robots playing the piano, giving massages or even doing dentistry: skills he says are a “value-add that is at least triple that of basic labour”.

Linkerbot’s hands can already rapidly turn screws, grasp deformable ​soft objects, thread a needle and engage ​in high-precision manufacturing. The company supplies ⁠some of China’s leading humanoid robot makers as well as some foreign industrial giants, which the company declined to disclose due to NDAs.

Its basic O6 light-weight model can carry a 50 kg load despite weighing only 370 g, performance Zhou said ​was a key advantage for industrial applications where miniaturisation and strength are required.

The company manufactures key components like joint modules, ​motors and reducers in-house, ⁠and uses specialised polymers that are self-lubricating and corrosion-resistant, Zhou said.

Besides industrial settings, Linkerbot’s hands are used by research institutes and leading global universities. The company has over 400 employees and five factories in Beijing and Shenzhen, and is developing intelligent production lines where robotic hands manufacture other hands.

A major obstacle to the widespread factory use of humanoids is ⁠their cost, ​at $100,000 to $150,000 per unit for the leading industrial models from Unitree, AgiBot and UBTech, analysts say. But ​Linkerbot says its hands are more easily deployed.

“Chinese factory owners are extremely pragmatic. They’ve realised that for most factory work, two arms and a pair of dexterous hands are enough,” said Zhou.

“Currently, many of ​our customers simply mount our hands onto existing robotic arms rather than buying a full humanoid,” he said.