Would You Buy 10 Humanoid Robots For Less Than The Price Of A Smartphone?

What if you could pick up a humanoid robot for less than the cost of a new flagship smartphone? Would you purchase one? What if you bought multiple units to handle your cooking, deep cleaning, childcare, and even your full-time job?

That is exactly the vision 40-year-old Zhou Yong, founder and chief technology officer of LinkerBot, is selling to the global tech industry. LinkerBot is one of China’s leading manufacturers of dexterous humanoid robotic hands, and right now the startup’s finished hardware—complete with five fully functional fingers and at least 11 joints—retails for as low as $600 in China. LinkerBot’s hands can already complete tasks ranging from playing piano and threading needles to tightening screws and assembling consumer electronics. Zhou predicts that within three to five years, the entry-level price for one of his hands will drop to just $200. Eventually, “the average person will own 10 robots,” Zhou shared in an exclusive interview with WIRED.

High-profile marketing events like Beijing’s recent humanoid robot marathon have drawn mainstream attention to robotic locomotion, but the true uncharted frontier of humanoid development is hands. “Hands account for most of the total engineering difficulty of building an entire humanoid robot,” Elon Musk noted at an industry event last fall. Founded only in 2023, LinkerBot has quickly risen to become the global market leader in this niche space. The company reports it shipped 10,000 robotic hands last year, representing 80% of total worldwide demand. Its client base includes academic research labs, industrial manufacturers, and other full humanoid robot developers.

The startup has also become a standout favorite among venture capital investors: it closed six separate funding rounds in just 13 months, with backers including the Chinese government, Alibaba’s Ant Group, and HSG, Sequoia Capital’s independent Chinese spin-off. LinkerBot is now pursuing an additional funding round that would value the company at $6 billion—double its valuation from just a few months ago. Per Bloomberg reporting, the firm is also exploring an initial public offering in Hong Kong, though Zhou declined to comment on these unconfirmed plans.

Zhou shifted his focus to robotics in 2019, after selling his previous autonomous driving-focused startup. He says he predicted the industry would enter a major boom around 2025, but he was still caught off guard by how rapidly growth accelerated. While OpenAI was once a pioneer in robotic hand development, Chinese startups have since taken the global lead, as many American competitors have shifted their focus to large language models and other AI software tools.

For robotics companies, “the valuation gap between the Chinese and U.S. primary markets has basically been erased,” Zhou says.

Zhou’s lifelong goal is to build a real-world version of Doraemon, the beloved Japanese anime character that carries an endless supply of magical gadgets in his pocket (his WeChat profile picture is even an image of Doraemon). He views building a capable, dexterous robotic hand as a critical foundational step toward making that dream a reality.

Selling Shovels to Miners

Zhou argues that the most successful companies focus on doing one thing exceptionally well, rather than spreading resources across every part of a new industry. That is why LinkerBot chose to specialize exclusively in hands, rather than attempting to build an entire full-body humanoid robot. This strategy also lets the company avoid direct competition with leading humanoid firms like Unitree and Tesla.

“When the humanoid robot industry grows to such a massive size, specializing in making hands is just like selling water or shovels during the gold rush,” says Hong Shangguan, a veteran Chinese tech investor and former partner at Beijing-based fund Legend Capital.

LinkerBot already holds a significant price advantage over global competitors. Its Linker Hand product line ranges from $600 to $15,000, with pricing tied to the number of joints and level of dexterity required by the customer. “A lot of companies can put together impressive demo reels of robotic hands. Far fewer can actually ship units that factories can realistically afford to deploy,” says Rui Ma, founder of independent research firm Tech Buzz China, which recently published analysis naming LinkerBot the startup best positioned to become the short-term industry standard.

Zhou has deep confidence in the strength of China’s manufacturing ecosystem. “In every product category, as long as China and other countries got started around the same time, China always ends up leading it—whether that’s solar panels or electric vehicles,” he says. His biggest current challenge is reframing China’s leadership as an opportunity, rather than a threat to global markets. “We are helping global robotics manufacturers lower their costs and accelerate wider adoption of humanoid tech,” Zhou argues. To address longstanding global skepticism about the quality of Chinese-made goods, the company offers international buyers up to one year for free product exchanges.

Robots Will Eventually Replace Human Workers

Zhou says the rollout of capable general-purpose humanoid robots will unfold in three clear stages. First, robots will take on emotional and entertainment roles: dancing, greeting guests, and meeting social needs, capabilities Chinese companies have already showcased widely over the past year. Next, they will move into narrowly defined service and industrial roles like mixing drinks, cooking, and sorting packages. The final stage, he says, will be widespread deployment in the most unstructured complex environment: the average home. A single robot may need to operate across hundreds of different households, and “each one could have a completely different layout and different objects,” he explains. These varied scenarios require robots to combine dozens of distinct skill sets just to complete a single small task.

One of LinkerBot’s current core strategies is adapting its hands for use in advanced manufacturing facilities, a key priority as China works to upgrade its domestic industrial base. The company even uses its own robotic hands on its assembly lines to build more robotic hands, as a demonstration of their practical industrial value.

China has long been known for low-cost labor, but domestic manufacturers now have a massive appetite for automation, Shangguan says. “When I visited EV factories in China and talked to production managers, they said even China is facing a labor shortage because the younger generation is less willing to work in factories,” she says. “For jobs where we can’t find workers, we also have to get robots.”

In Zhou’s long-term vision of the future, robots will eventually become 100 times more capable than any human and will completely replace human workers. While it is difficult to imagine what such a world would look like, Zhou says he is not worried about the potential downsides. “People don’t really care whether they are unemployed; what they care about is whether they receive relief payments or welfare benefits,” he says.

Zhou predicts that by the time this future arrives, AI and robots will have made all goods and services so abundant that people will no longer need to work to survive. But even in that world, he acknowledges that inequality will persist: “Someone might see online that rich people are traveling to the moon, while they themselves can only travel to Italy.”

This is an edition of Made in China, the newsletter by Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis. Read previous newsletters here.